From list-managers-owner Sat Feb 1 17:13:56 1997
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Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 09:12:27 -0500
To: CEO@Citadel.Net, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 12:09 PM -0500 1/22/1997, Dr. Manion wrote:
>Juno, never gives me any problems but AOL is a constant source of
>problems. Their people subscribe and then immediately start posting
>messages to the list, "GET ME OFF THIS DAMN LIST!" etc..
Just wait until they get bigger. I guarantee that you'll have
precisely the same problems with AT&T WorldNet, WebTV, and anyone
else who gets really big. It's just the nature of the beast of large
communities -- we don't have any more than our share of clueless
customers (not much, anyway ;-), it's just that because we've got
eight million customers, we've got a lot more total clueless people
than other places.
If you want another comparison, look at crime statistics for
small towns of a few hundred or a few thousand people, and compare
that to the largest cities in the world. They don't really have much
more crimes of most types per capita, but because they have a lot
more people, it seems that way.
>At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to refuse any and all
>email from AOL. That should also eliminate about 99% of the spams we
>receive.
If that's what you want. We can make sure that no mail from your
site makes it into AOL, too.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sat Feb 1 21:25:59 1997
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To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Subject: Re: Missed point...
References: <199701310031.TAA12683@www6.clever.net>
From: Paul Graham
Date: 02 Feb 1997 00:08:13 -0500
In-Reply-To: Jason L Tibbitts III's message of 31 Jan 1997 00:39:13 -0600
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indeed. i wonder when aol is going to switch to dsn style bounces. if
your list software permits unchecked subscriptions then you will have
problems. however i do think that aol -- as the largest source of bounced
mail on the Internet -- has some obligation to format bounces in a style
that's at least close to the rfc (e.g. doing failures would be good enough).
>>>>> "J" == Jason L Tibbitts writes:
J> As far as I'm concerned AOL has provided access for many of the
J> members of my mailing lists, and has given me another bounce format
J> to try to figure out. That's about it.
--
paul
pjg(at)acsu.Buffalo.EDU |public keys at:
| http://urth.acsu.Buffalo.EDU/~pjg/key.html
if the above contains opinions they are mine unless marked otherwise.
From list-managers-owner Sat Feb 1 22:10:32 1997
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Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 22:01:05 -0800
To: Brad Knowles , CEO@Citadel.Net,
list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Chuq Von Rospach
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 6:12 AM -0800 1/30/97, Brad Knowles wrote:
>It's just the nature of the beast of large
>communities -- we don't have any more than our share of clueless
>customers (not much, anyway ;-), it's just that because we've got
>eight million customers, we've got a lot more total clueless people
>than other places.
Hate to say it, Brad, but as someone who's defended AOL in the past, I
have to now say -- I don't think so.
Right now, I'm doing an address verification probe over on
solutions.apple.com, sending out mail to each subscribed address to
check for bounces. So far, I've sent out about 22,000 of the 52,000
e-mails (I've got the process throttled to avoid overloading any
server, including my own, so mail is going out once every 7-10 seconds.
It'll take about 5 days to finish the entire probe).
As part of the message, I say, quite explicitly and in capital letters,
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. I also give an address that people can
mail to if they have questions/problems/need help, whatever.
So far, just FWIW, my bounce rate is about 2%. Given that I try to keep
my mailing lists pretty clean from bounces, I find that number
fascinating, because there seems to be an awful lot of bouncemail
that's not getting back to my server. Some servers just seem to not
send errors back to bulk priority at all, or do so intermittently, so
this standard-class probe is getting a bunch of things sent to it.
Of course, a number of people are using this as a hook into getting
help, either to update addresses or to get off the lists. That was part
of it (and, frankly, the "DO NOT REPLY..." was *just* to see who reads
and follows instructions and who doesn't. I was curious).
I have picked up about 250 messages in response to this probe of an
administrative nature -- that means wanting addresses changed or
wanting to be unsubscribed. That ignores vacation bots and the like,
which I'm seeing a lot less of than I'd expected.
Of that 250 (roughly) messages so far, about 60% are coming to the
requested address. The other 40% are from people replying despite the
instructions and returning messages to the bounce-test mailbot.
Now, for the interesting part. Of that 40% ignoring the instructions, a
solid 80% of those are AOL people. Only about 20% of the AOL accounts
sending me mail on this followed that instruction.
So, I've sent about 3,500 e-mails to AOL accounts, and 18,500 e-mails
to non-AOL accounts. My response is about 120 to the wrong address, of
which about 95 were AOL addresses. And about 140 to the requested
address, of which about 25 were AOL addresses.
Right off the bat, there's a discrepancy: AOL responses are about 3.5%
of the subscriber base, while for the rest of the net, it's only 0.7%.
80% of those responses were misdirected, either because the users
didn't bother to read the instructions or chose not to follow them,
while for the rest of the net, that number was quite small. I don't
have to run this through a stat package to see it's statistically
significant -- AOL users under identical situations are a *LOT* worse
at reading and following instructions. They don't bother, or they
can't, or whatever. A few, who's responses ranged from haughty to
obnoxious to one rather abusive twit sent responses that boiled down to
"I don't care what you say, I'm responding here, and dammit, you do
what I tell you to do."
And the responses I got back from AOL made it clear these folks don't
know how to operate the machinery. Period. Despite my system sending
instructions on subscription, and re-sending them to the list every two
weeks, these people in many cases had no clue how to unsubscribe, had
no clue how to get help, never bothered to read any of the
instructions, don't know basics like e-mailing postmaster for help --
nothing. And when the information *is* presented to them, there's a
high level of simply choosing to ignore it, doing what they want, and
assuming it'll work anyway.
I'm *not* seeing this from Compuserve (also probed), or earthlink
(whihc is probably a very distant second in cluelessness so far), or
any other service. It's kinda scary -- AOL users don't read the
instructions, don't learn the basics,a dn then just sit back and TAKE
IT in a very passive way, or they lash out and start doing random
things, like screaming at the list, screaming at users posting to the
list -- anything but the right thing. And from my feedback of the last
couple of days, they're not terribly interested in learning. They want
pack slaves to do all this for them. I'm *not* seeing that, except for
a very isolated person here or there, anywhere else, but it's fairly
common in the culture of the users I'm working with on AOL right now.
This is not good. AOL has a huge amount of work to do to clean up their
user base. Statistically, they *are* much different from the rest of
the net, and with a high level of cluelessness and a low interest level
in learning this stuff. And there's enough arrogance mixed into the
mail I'm getting ("I don't know, I don't wnat to know, it's your job to
fix this for me") that I'm not interested in defending AOL much right
now. They're different, in very negative ways, and if I were to roll
these numbers up formally and identify this in detail, I can prove it
statistically.
I'm not going to bother - the general trends are enough for me. But you
ought to know about this, since this is fairly good data that I'm
generating in a concentrated form with a good control against AOL,
since I'm annoying users across the world equally here... The fact that
something like an order of magnitude more AOL users by percentage of
subscribers are responding is a huge warning sign all on its own --
because they're responding because they don't have the *basic*
information needed to even find a post master or *ask* for help, until
some address pops up they can latch onto. That's scary, or it should
be, especially since that information is dumped into their mailbox on a
regular basis, if they'd only read it. But the other scary thing is
they're proving quite conclusively they don't bother to read
instructions, and then wonder why things don't work....
Anyway, just some data to chew on. It turns out, from what I can see,
that AOL users are different than the rest fo the net, not in positive
ways. AOL's *not* just bigger. They're doing a rotten job of educating
their users on how to use these internet tools, and their users are
doing a rotten job of using the tools we give them, starting with
instructions and help files. And I see a general lack of tacking
responsibility for themselves and expecting others to take
responsibility for them in their responses to me, which also aren't
showing up from any other service....
Use, or ignore, as you wish... Data's always fun, because everyone can
interpret it differently. This is mine...
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com)
( +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
From list-managers-owner Sat Feb 1 22:40:41 1997
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Date: Sun, 02 Feb 1997 01:36:36 -0500
To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Stan Ryckman
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
Well, here *is* a "fresh horror from AOL," and it has little or
nothing to do with its users' cluefulness.
Saturday my list just got three bounces from AOL for the *same* message
to the *same* user (as shown by Message-ID and Received headers going
into AOL via emin27.mail.aol.com). The bounces came from:
MRIN21.MAIL.AOL.COM
MRIN19.MAIL.AOL.COM
MRIN20.MAIL.AOL.COM
It's for a user I'd been getting bounces for full mailbox for a couple
of days (but only one per message, and from AOL.COM), so I know he's
not triply-subscribed via forwards from somewhere.
I had already set him to INDEX (this is a LISTSERV list) to reduce
bounce volume; this was from an "old" post preceding that action of mine.
If I start hearing from MRINxx for large ranges of xx, things could
end up even worse than they were though!
Cheers,
Stan
From list-managers-owner Sat Feb 1 23:55:45 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:57:41 -0500
To: CEO@Citadel.Net, list-managers@greatcircle.com
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 6:12 AM -0500 1/30/1997, Dr. Manion wrote:
>Sorry, I haven't seen any of this. I've been on the Internet for more
>than two years. I have yet to see anything positive coming from AOL.
I've been on the 'net for well over a decade. Maybe you just
have to be a more experienced netizen to see all the various things
we do to benefit the 'net.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sat Feb 1 23:59:28 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 02:22:33 -0500
To: Christopher Samuel , CEO@citadel.net
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Cc: list-managers@greatcircle.com
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 4:47 AM -0500 1/31/1997, Christopher Samuel wrote:
>In that case can I respectfully request that this be taken to private
>e-mail between the participants.
You certainly won't see any more posts from me on this matter.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:03:32 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 00:42:33 -0700 (MST)
From: Randy Cassingham
X-Sender: arcie@netcom20
To: List Managers List
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19970202063636.006510dc@pop.ma.ultranet.com>
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On Sun, 2 Feb 1997, Stan Ryckman wrote:
> Well, here *is* a "fresh horror from AOL," and it has little or
> nothing to do with its users' cluefulness.
>
> Saturday my list just got three bounces from AOL for the *same* message
> to the *same* user (as shown by Message-ID and Received headers going
> into AOL via emin27.mail.aol.com). The bounces came from:
> MRIN21.MAIL.AOL.COM
> MRIN19.MAIL.AOL.COM
> MRIN20.MAIL.AOL.COM
It's not an isolated incident -- it's happening to my list, too. Very
annoying.
/ Randy Cassingham * Author, "This is True" * arcie@netcom.com \
| For info on What I Do, send a blank e-mail to TrueInfo@freecom.com |
\ or check out * I promise you'll like it /
+ FIGHT SPAM! Send a blank e-mail to nospam@mailback.com for help! +
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:07:28 1997
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References: Jason L Tibbitts III's message of 31 Jan 1997 00:39:13
-0600 <199701310031.TAA12683@www6.clever.net>
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 02:21:40 -0500
To: Paul Graham , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: Missed point...
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
At 12:08 AM -0500 2/2/1997, Paul Graham wrote:
>indeed. i wonder when aol is going to switch to dsn style bounces. if
>your list software permits unchecked subscriptions then you will have
>problems. however i do think that aol -- as the largest source of bounced
>mail on the Internet -- has some obligation to format bounces in a style
>that's at least close to the rfc (e.g. doing failures would be good enough).
FITNR -- Fixed In The Next Release. ;-)
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:10:30 1997
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References: "Dr. Manion"'s message of Thu, 30 Jan 1997 18:34:06
+0000 <199701310031.TAA12683@www6.clever.net>
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 02:19:46 -0500
To: Jason L Tibbitts III , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: Missed point...
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
At 1:39 AM -0500 1/31/1997, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>As far as I'm concerned AOL has provided access for many of the members of
>my mailing lists, and has given me another bounce format to try to figure
>out. That's about it.
As we become more standard, we'll be fixing that last part.
We've had to live with some legacy software for a while, and anytime
you get yourselves into that kind of position, it takes a while to
get it replaced. But we are working on that.
We also hope to help fix that first part, by getting even more
people online, and therefore even more potential subscribers for you.
;-)
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:11:05 1997
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References: from "Brad
Knowles" at Jan 30, 97 09:27:13 am
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:28:06 -0500
To: "Nathan J. Mehl"
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Cc: meo@schoneal.com, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
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At 11:20 AM -0500 1/30/1997, Nathan J. Mehl wrote:
>In the immortal words of Brad Knowles:
>
>> We are *very* interested in being proper net.citizens, and are
>> not only working to adhere to the rules to the best of our ability
>> (as model net.citizens), we are also helping to write the rules when
>> there is new ground that hasn't really stabilized yet.
>
>I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if this is the case,
>why are unverified accounts still able to send email and post to
>usenet?
We verify credit cards interactively. You cannot use a fake
credit card number to get an AOL account. I'm not sure what else you
might mean by "unverified accounts", though.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:15:21 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 03:06:20 -0500
To: Stan Ryckman , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: New fresh horror (was: Re: fresh horror from AOL)
Cc: knowlesb@aol.net
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 1:36 AM -0500 2/2/1997, Stan Ryckman wrote:
>Well, here *is* a "fresh horror from AOL," and it has little or
>nothing to do with its users' cluefulness.
>
>Saturday my list just got three bounces from AOL for the *same* message
>to the *same* user (as shown by Message-ID and Received headers going
>into AOL via emin27.mail.aol.com). The bounces came from:
> MRIN21.MAIL.AOL.COM
> MRIN19.MAIL.AOL.COM
> MRIN20.MAIL.AOL.COM
I don't believe these machines are in production yet. If you're
getting bounces from them, my guess is that some machine on the
sending end is horribly misconfigured, or it pointing at a nameserver
that has a horribly corrupted cache (I've seen quite a few messages
flowing through or attempting to flow through machines that weren't
advertised anywhere and weren't ready or available for general
production, and from a variety of sources).
If you send copies of all of the relevant mail messages (the
original plus the bounces from each of these machines) to my work
email address (KnowlesB@aol.net), I'll take a look at them tomorrow
and see what I can find.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:17:03 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 02:17:34 -0500
To: CEO@Citadel.Net, Bonnie Scott ,
list-managers@greatcircle.com
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 1:29 PM -0500 1/30/1997, Dr. Manion wrote:
>He himself, stated that anyone could suggest improvements for AOL.
>This is not my job. I am not getting paid to do so. That is AOL's
>responsibility.
Internal staff do make suggestions, but we are only a relatively
small groups of people. We cannot assume that we have the sum total
knowledge of the world, or even just the Internet, even if we do have
40% of the "brain trust" from IBM's T.J. Watson research center from
back when it seriously down-staffed (they have more patents on file
than even Lucent Technologies, which used to be AT&T Bell Labs).
So, we came up with this idea that we would let *anyone* in the
world who thinks they have a good idea submit it to us for
consideration as something we could do to help improve the Internet
at a whole. I think we're pretty unique in that respect -- I don't
know of anyone else in the world running such a project.
Of course, a lot of the things we do help both ourselves and the
Internet as a whole. I would expect that to be the case, since by
definition, we are a part of the Internet, and are the largest single
part of it. That's just simple math.
>I believe that you missed the point. This is my experience. Your
>experience may differ. However, my experience is that AOL has not
>provided any benefit to the Internet as a whole. This is my opinion.
Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion. No doubt about
that. However, although I certainly disagree with certain marketing
moves and/or their timing, I believe it behooves everyone to have as
much facts from both sides of the issue before we start making public
position statements, especially strong ones.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:20:27 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:55:42 -0500
To: nolan@tssi.com, list-managers@GreatCircle.com (List Managers)
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 11:31 AM -0500 1/30/1997, Mike Nolan wrote:
>There was a time when AOL was a whole lot less cooperative when dealing with
>standards and netiquette. I think their mail blocker is a good idea, but
>still needs refinement to deal with the issues we've been discussing here.
As the guy who's going to be implementing a large part of
whatever we may be doing in the future for dealing with certain types
of mail, I can guarantee you we've got quite a few techniques in
mind. When we actually roll them out, you better hope you're not
anywhere near the systems that these bozos are using.
>I've got over 100 AOL subscribers on my lists, and I have a lot more trouble
>from other services with a lot fewer subscribers. (But, if AOL would just
>increase their mailbox size...)
Well, we already allow them 550 messages. Since we limit
Internet mail to a maximum of 2MB (assuming you're sending
attachments), this means we allow each user up to ~1.6GB mailbox
storage space (internally, attachments can be up to 15MB in size, so
this would be ~8.2GB, if you were talking about only internal mail).
Show me another place on the planet that allows their users to
build up mailboxes this large.
>And being the big dog, AOL is going to be the whipping boy for the industry.
>(Compuserve and Prodigy took their lumps, too.)
Yup. Life is tough being the top dog, but I'll be one of the
first to take potshots at AOL if I think they're doing stupid stuff.
What I don't appreciate is public bashing by people who don't
have all the facts.
>BTW, my 11 year old son keeps pointing out that AOL is still running some
>spot TV ads.
I believe that the settlement was to not run ads in areas where
the access points are full, and beyond that we would advertise only
enough to keep a steady-state membership of eight million users,
until such time as we've spent that 330 million to upgrade our
systems, and have the necessary capacity.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:22:28 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 02:07:53 -0500
To: Ken Dykes , list-managers@greatcircle.com
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: Stale horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
At 1:37 PM -0500 1/30/1997, Ken Dykes wrote:
>while Brad writes a reasonable message, i must take one minor exception...
>
>>Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 09:17:26 -0500
>>From: Brad Knowles
>>Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
>>
>> Check the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ. That wouldn't get written
>>without their [AOL] support. Check all the mailing lists run on
>
>of course it would have been.
>dont presume that just because AOL do something that it wouldn't have
>been done otherwise.
No, although I was maintaining it when I was hired, I guarantee
you that I wouldn't have had the time or interest to continue for
much longer, had I not been hired into a position where I would be
implementing that sort of thing on a daily basis and managing the
resulting systems.
The original sendmail FAQ as it was certainly wouldn't have
gotten much work at all, had I not taken it over from Eric. And I
don't believe that there would have been anyone interested or willing
to take it over if I'd let the thing drop a year and a half ago.
>so, if AOL is so supportive of sendmail users, when will AOL's own mail
>software do the sendmail-thing with respect to "Precedence: list (or bulk)"
>and NOT send back whole digests just to say "user invalid".
That's a flaw in the way our gateway system works, and we are
spending millions of dollars to replace the whole thing (removing our
dependance on sendmail for that function).
At that point, we will generate "invalid user" email messages
during the collection phase, and it will be up to the sending MTA to
generate the bounce and send it back (which would be whatever MTA
your mailing list management package uses). Since we will have never
accepted the message in the first place (at least, not to that
recipient), there will be no possibility for us to cause the bounce
to mis-delivered.
And by the way, if you'll check the README that ships with
sendmail (up to 8.8.5), you'll note that I personally have made
several suggestions or actual contributions of code. I am
particularly proud of the fact that support for TCP-Wrappers is now
integrated, so that Email Administrators across the world can have
access to this very powerful tool to help them control abuse of their
systems.
I could not possibly have made those contributions, were I not at
a place like AOL where those kinds of issues came up, and where the
results end up benefitting everyone.
>you'd think the resulting massive reduction in bandwith at their own
>gateways would be to their own advantage...
Yup, it would. And it will. We've been working on this
replacement system for several months now, and it's finally getting
to the point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
But we've had to make sure that it got implemented right the
first time, so that we don't have the same kinds of problems as
CompuServe did when they first rolled out their new gateway system.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:24:05 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 03:00:01 -0500
To: Chuq Von Rospach , CEO@Citadel.Net,
list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror from
AOL)
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
At 1:01 AM -0500 2/2/1997, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>Anyway, just some data to chew on. It turns out, from what I can see,
>that AOL users are different than the rest fo the net, not in positive
>ways. AOL's *not* just bigger. They're doing a rotten job of educating
>their users on how to use these internet tools, and their users are
>doing a rotten job of using the tools we give them, starting with
>instructions and help files. And I see a general lack of tacking
>responsibility for themselves and expecting others to take
>responsibility for them in their responses to me, which also aren't
>showing up from any other service....
I guess this means I'm going to have to violate my most recent
statement in this thread.
I've read this note, and I've known you long enough to know that
there is no need to do the statistical analysis. You've convinced me
that I was wrong, and that we do have significantly higher percentage
of clueless users than the average.
We clearly need to educate our users better.
But, taking my AOL hat off now, how would you educate a large
user community like this? I mean, the average Usenet poster seems
quite clueless enough (give most of the posts I've read and personal
email messages I get from people asking me to solve their problem for
them), and quite incapable of reading the amazingly complete and
accurate array of information that can be found in the FAQ archives.
I mean, you can lead a user to the FAQ Archives, but you can't make
them drink from the Font of Knowledge or the Well of Wisdom.
How, then, do we educate a community of users that is even more
clueless than this average?
Up until a few months ago, it took a fairly significant
investment of money to get on the 'net -- probably something like
$1000 for the computer, then you had to understand how to hook up a
modem to it, and use whatever software (whether it's AOL or something
else) to get online.
But now, you've got WebTV. $300, and it does everything for you
-- you just have to plug in three cables (one power, one video, one
telephone). The ISP access provided by AT&T WorldNet (and the RBOCs)
are going to create similar problems -- Internet "dialtone" for many
people will now be provided by the same folks who provide their
"voice dialtone".
You think eight million users creates a concentrated percentage
of clueless users? Try 250 million, and that's just in the U.S.
How can we educate a community like this? I mean, this is a
group of people, the vast majority of whom can't even fix the
blinking "12:00" on their VCRs -- how can we possibly hope to educate
them to a level we consider minimally acceptable?
As a guy who sees the FAQ he currently maintains growing ad
infinitum (as I dumb it down further and further, to try and answer
more and more basic questions), I'm beginning to get quite
disheartened here.
Does anyone have any ideas?
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 00:26:47 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:48:14 -0500
To: CEO@Citadel.Net, list-managers@greatcircle.com
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: RE: Fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
At 5:53 AM -0500 1/30/1997, Dr. Manion wrote:
>This wasn't a bash on AOL this was a statement of fact. If AOL was
>truly responsible it wouldn't have taken the threat of court action to
>get them to take action.
I've got this *wonderful* little joke I found at work. When I
get there Monday morning, I'll forward it to myself at home, then
onto the list. However, let me summarize it here:
You see, this guy threatens to sue the telephone companies,
because sometimes he tries to call someone (especially on a holiday
like Mother's Day), and all he gets is busy signals. Obviously, the
phone company is incompetent and should be sued for selling him a
service he can't use.
Likewise, he's going to sue every government on the face of the
planet, because when he goes out onto the highway at rush hour, he
has to wait in traffic.
He's also going to sue every bank and other financial institution
in the world, because they obviously should have increased their
capacity so that he wouldn't have to wait in line.
In addition, he's going to sue the cable companies for all those
times when he turned on the set and the reception wasn't perfect, or
when he had to wait on the phone while they processed his order for
some pay-per-view service.
Suffice it to say that it puts into very real perspective what
it's like for people to file suit against us for not having
sufficient capacity.
However, don't misunderstand me -- I'll be the first person to
speak up and say that AOL screwed up *royally* in not having more
hardware in place sooner. Unfortunately, that was a decision made
somewhere above the level of the people who have to try to manage
this system (i.e., all us technical guys who had some clue as to how
ludicrous this concept was), and we have just had to live with it.
Now, you try working fourteen-plus hours a day trying to hold a
system together with your bare hands, and we'll see how you react
when you see the kind of AOL-bashing I've seen here.
I guarantee you that everyone in Operations is literally working
their butt off (and endangering their marriages, etc...) to keep this
system up and working, and more importantly, to expand the system
quickly enough that we can catch up to and overtake the growth we've
seen, so that we can get ahead of that damn eight-ball.
If you want to help us in that process, please do. If you have a
problem with some part of the system right now, if you bring that to
our attention in a reasonably professional manner, we'll do
everything we can to help you get that problem solved (given the
physical constraints of how many seconds there are in a minute, how
many minutes there are in a day, how many days there are in a year,
how fast our vendors can roll hardware out their doors, etc...).
>There are all kinds of excuses that AOL has for their actions. They
>have the resources to first run "controlled tests" of their email
>before providing it. Whatever problems their email or subscribers
>cause is still their responsibility *not* the responsibility of the
>listowners who are providing service to everyone.
We do controlled tests. In fact, from what I know of the sizes
of the other largest systems on the 'net, our *test* systems are as
large as or larger than the *production* systems of most of our
competitors.
However, that fact means that there are some issues of scale that
simply will not show up until something is rolled out into
production, because there is nothing else on the planet that is of
the same scale and type.
In addition, no matter how big your test systems are, there are
simply some things that are esoteric enough that they cannot possibly
all be tested. If that were the case, then nothing but perfect code
would roll out of Microsoft's offices in Redmond, because they've got
more money to spend on testing their various OSes and applications
than anyone else in the world, and yet their code is buggier than
most anyone else I can think of.
I can only assume that they don't really care, or they could at
least do better than they currently manage (knowing something of
operating and testing very large systems, I would never expect them
to be perfect).
>AOL is a commercial service and despite illusions of grandeur,
>doesn't own the Internet. I personally wasted three days cleaning up
>after AOL. Three days which could have better spent elsewhere.
In all likelihood, if you compare the amount of time spent
cleaning up per user, we're not costing you much more effort or money
per users, it's the fact that we have 20% of the entire Internet
population on AOL. I'd say our "error" rates per capita are probably
about as low as or lower than most any other site on the 'net, it's
just that we have so many more users than any other site on the 'net.
At least, I say this based on my own experience as a list manager
(in my private life), and on my conversations with other list
managers (over the years). If this is not true for your particular
list, then there must be something unique about your list that is
causing you more problems than most others.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 07:25:43 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 16:11:43 +0100
From: Eric Thomas
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
To: List Managers
In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:55:42 -0500 from
list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:55:42 -0500 Brad Knowles said:
> Well, we already allow them 550 messages. Since we limit
>Internet mail to a maximum of 2MB (assuming you're sending attachments),
>this means we allow each user up to ~1.6GB mailbox storage space
I have no problem with that, however it would be really nice if people
were allowed to accumulate more mail as long as the total did not exceed
20M or whatever quota you felt comfortable with. Maybe even as a premium
service costing another $2/month or whatever. To give just one example,
there's a lot (as list owner demographics go) of people trying to run
moderated lists on AOL and finding it very difficult to cope with long
weekends or the like when they are away for 3-4 days. Yet some of them
are not comfortable enough with other services and want to stay on AOL.
Eric
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 09:40:35 1997
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From: Mike Nolan
Message-Id: <199702021728.LAA12221@celery.tssi.com>
Subject: AOL mailbox limit, hig volume lists in general
To: brad@his.com (Brad Knowles)
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 11:28:24 -0600 (CST)
Cc: nolan@tssi.com, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
In-Reply-To: from "Brad Knowles" at Feb 2, 97 01:55:42 am
Reply-To: nolan@tssi.com
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Brad Knowles wrote:
> Well, we [AOL] already allow them 550 messages. Since we limit
> Internet mail to a maximum of 2MB (assuming you're sending
> attachments), this means we allow each user up to ~1.6GB mailbox
> storage space (internally, attachments can be up to 15MB in size, so
> this would be ~8.2GB, if you were talking about only internal mail).
The problem is the fixed number of messages. I'd much rather see a
disk quota limit, perhaps as an option. That way users who choose to
subscribe to busy lists like mine (the average message is under 1K, but I've
been known to send out over 100 messages in a single day) don't fill up just
because they take a long weekend off as long as they stay within their disk
quota. (I do offer a daily digest, I'll make sure my AOL subscribers know
it is one way around the full mailbox syndrome, although at the cost of
losing some immediacy.)
> >BTW, my 11 year old son keeps pointing out that AOL is still running some
> >spot TV ads.
>
> I believe that the settlement was to not run ads in areas where
> the access points are full, and beyond that we would advertise only
> enough to keep a steady-state membership of eight million users,
> until such time as we've spent that 330 million to upgrade our
> systems, and have the necessary capacity.
Well, one of the places I'm seeing the ads is on the Preview Channel, but
I don't know if their ads are different on every cable service that carries it.
(I'm in Lincoln, Nebraska, and according to the local media AOL lines are busy
here a lot--in fact that's why I dropped my AOL subscription 3 or so years
ago, I could never get on so I found a better provider for me.)
Mentioning my traffic level raises a question, so to return to the general
subject of mailing list management, what do other list managers running
high volume lists do about bounces?
If I'm sending out 100 messages a day, that means I'm sending out one every
few minutes. A two or three hour outage (unfortunately, still common on
the Internet) means I can get a dozen or more bounces from a single
subscriber, well above the bounce threshold for most list packages.
I really don't want to kick people off my lists just because of a transient
net problem, because it winds up generating a lot of traffic to me about
'what happened to my subscription?' so to get around this, on my most active
lists I've raised the limit. As a result I've been known to get a thousand
bounces in a single day.
Are there packages that can discriminate between different classes of
bounces and handle them differently in terms of deciding whether or not to
purge the subscriber? (Procmail/Smartlist doesn't, except for 'warning'
messages, which technically aren't bounces anyway. Speaking of which,
aren't non-delivery notices sort of unnecessary these days for bulk mail, to
to mention nearly as much of an annoyance as 'message opened' notices?)
One thought I've had was that to keep track by days rather than by number of
bounces. (3 consecutive days of bounced messages and you're off.)
Unfortunately, if I'm sending out 100 messages/day, that makes things worse,
because I've got my limit set at something like 40 bounces right now.
Since I'm in free association here, I've seen packages (majordomo-based)
that rolled bounced users over to a daily 'bounce notice' list, is anyone
rolling bounced users over to some kind of digest form as an intermediate
step before purging them? (That would have the advantage of putting my AOL
users on a list form that takes up fewer of their 550 mailbox slots.)
--
Mike Nolan
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 10:10:36 1997
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From: Mike Nolan
Message-Id: <199702021806.MAA12974@celery.tssi.com>
Subject: Re: AOL mailbox limit, hig volume lists in general
To: list-managers@GreatCircle.com (List Managers)
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 12:06:34 -0600 (CST)
Reply-To: nolan@tssi.com
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The following bouce struck me as being highly appropriate to the subject
matter under discussion, not to mention a bit ironic. I don't know if
my list management software would recognize this as a bounce, but wouldn't
it be a good idea if the message indicated what the limit being exceeded was?
BTW, the bounce included the full text of my message, so apparently Sprynet
doesn't truncate bounces on bulk mail, either.
--
Mike Nolan
Forwarded message:
> From root@m4.sprynet.com Sun Feb 2 11:52:28 1997
> Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 09:47:14 -0800
> Message-Id: <199702021747.JAA25397@m4.sprynet.com>
> To: nolan@tssi.com
> References: <199702021728.LAA12221@celery.tssi.com>
> In-Reply-To: <199702021728.LAA12221@celery.tssi.com>
> X-Loop: postmaster@sprynet.com
> From: Interserv Operations
> Subject: Re: AOL mailbox limit, hig volume lists in general [delivery failure to foodfant@m4.sprynet.com]
>
> The message that you sent to the above recipient was not delivered. All mail
> sent to this account will continue to be returned until the recipient has
> removed enough mail to lower the mailbox size below the system mailbox limit.
>
> --
>
> Sprynet Network Operations Center Postmaster@sprynet.com
> 2001 6th Ave. Suite 3025B noc@interserv.net
> Seattle, WA. 95121 CompuServe/Internet Division
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 10:40:41 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 10:36:52 -0800
To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Paul Hoffman
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users
Cc: Brad Knowles , Chuq Von Rospach
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(Disclaimer: both AOL and Apple are members of IMC.)
Since this is the list-managers mailing list, let's keep this focused on
mailing lists. AOL has not done a great job of helping their members
understand how to get on, get off, and be nice members of mailing lists.
Unfortunately, the same can be said for Apple and its employees, from my
personal list management experience (I say "unfortunately" because I'm a
card-carrying Mac enthusiast).
The issue of mailing list education goes way beyond finger-pointing and
accusing. Today, AOL attracts more people who are probably harder to
educate about the Internet than other ISPs do. However, I believe that we
are rapidly running out of new Internet users who are easily trained, and
we are about to see new users from all ISPs starting to look like the
clueless (and sometimes abusive) AOL users that list managers dread.
Corporate employees, even at computer manufacturers like Apple, have either
chosen to get on the Internet before today, or have chosen not to. Those
who have chosen not to but change their minds (probably involuntarily) this
year represent a challenge to all mailing list owners. Instead of having
just one email interface, they'll have many, many of them not native
Internet applications, often written by companies that were actively
antagonistic to the Internet.
So, what can we do to educate the members of our lists? What can we do to
reduce the problems caused by the users who can't/won't be educated about
the basics? Is this an issue of education or enforcement?
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 10:55:32 1997
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To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Subject: Re: AOL mailbox limit, hig volume lists in general
References: <199702021728.LAA12221@celery.tssi.com>
From: Paul Graham
Date: 02 Feb 1997 13:40:08 -0500
In-Reply-To: Mike Nolan's message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 11:28:24 -0600 (CST)
Message-ID:
Lines: 30
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listserv handles most bounces directly. addresses are removed when either
a time or volume threshold has been passed. this sort of approach is vital
if you have busy lists. i believe it also distinguishes between transient
and permanent failures (as dsn encodes them). after you do this you have
to deal with broken mailers that return bounces to the From: line and
annoying mailers that don't use dsn format (or really annoying mailers like
sendmail 8.6 that use mime but don't do dsn or x400 gateways that return
random looking junk that isn't worth trying to parse).
despite my profound annoyance at the way aol works at least their bounce
format can be trivially converted to dsn (so why don't they do it?).
another approach is to simply discard all bounces and periodically probe or
confirm addresses.
btw, bounces remain useful for people who want to prune lists but don't want
to or can't do probes or reconfirmations.
>>>>> "Mike" == Mike Nolan writes:
Mike> Mentioning my traffic level raises a question, so to return to
Mike> the general subject of mailing list management, what do other
Mike> list managers running high volume lists do about bounces?
--
paul
pjg@acsu.Buffalo.EDU |public keys at:
| http://urth.acsu.Buffalo.EDU/~pjg/key.html
if the above contains opinions they are mine unless marked otherwise.
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 11:40:41 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 14:33 EDT
From: "E. Allen Smith"
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror from AOL)
To: brad@his.com
Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
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From: IN%"brad@his.com" "Brad Knowles" 2-FEB-1997 03:29:09.36
> I've read this note, and I've known you long enough to know that
>there is no need to do the statistical analysis. You've convinced me
>that I was wrong, and that we do have significantly higher percentage
>of clueless users than the average.
What proportion of _new_ (say, have used Internet email for less
than 3 months total) users does AOL have, both as a proportion of AOL users
and as a proportion of new users on the Internet? These would appear to be
more significant statistics than the proportion of Internet users going via
AOL (20%, as you've said before). I suspect the result would tend to confirm
your above statement, and Chuq (sp?)'s findings.
> But, taking my AOL hat off now, how would you educate a large
>user community like this? I mean, the average Usenet poster seems
>quite clueless enough (give most of the posts I've read and personal
>email messages I get from people asking me to solve their problem for
>them), and quite incapable of reading the amazingly complete and
>accurate array of information that can be found in the FAQ archives.
>I mean, you can lead a user to the FAQ Archives, but you can't make
>them drink from the Font of Knowledge or the Well of Wisdom.
I would personally attribute this to A. failures in the educational
system; B. liberals busily trying to make sure (and succeeding in convincing
people that this _should_ be the case) that people don't have to take care
of themselves in regards to income; C. conservatives busily trying to make
sure (and succeeding in convincing people that this _should_ be the case)
that people don't have to take care of themselves in regards to ideas.
(If you aren't a libertarian like me, feel free to delete either B or C
as appropriate for your consideration; blaming either side works almost as
well as both.) This manifestation is a syndrome that I've seen a lot of, and
that I'll be commenting on further.
In other words, most people today can't figure something out from
simple pre-packaged information; they have to be hand-held. And with a
lot lower proportion of experienced to new users on AOL (and on the other
quickly-expanding services you mention below), the hand-holding doesn't
happen.
> How, then, do we educate a community of users that is even more
>clueless than this average?
Well, A. convince the marketing people not to expand so fast
(the recent debacle with expanding too fast in terms of hardware
may teach them something... or it may just show exactly how little
they're thinking about things like this); and B. don't make things
so easy for within-service stuff.
The latter appears insane... until you understand what I
mean (I hope). First, people who are used to having to work to
understand how to get stuff within a service to work will be used
to having to work to understand stuff outside of a service. They
won't be used to unnecessary levels of hand-holding (as opposed to
the necessary variety I spoke of earlier) and to service providers
being nice to them despite impoliteness, _determined_ cluelessness,
and (to put it bluntly) idiocy. (Of course, part of this is that
syndrome I mentioned earlier... that essentially says (in this case)
that people who you're not paying to be nice to you should be just
as nice to you as people you are paying.) Second, they'll have had
to figure out things on their own - which is about the only way I
know of to teach people to keep on doing that. (I will comment that
GUIs are pretty bad about this, at least for those that (unlike me)
find them easy to use. They don't teach you anything about the guts
of the computer. When you're used to clicking on a nice dialog box
to request help from someone official, you aren't used to figuring
out who to send the help request to when it isn't for a dialog
box.) Third, it filters out the idiots, both those who are dumb
to start with and those who are effectively so because of that
syndrome. (I mean no insult to _all_ AOL, etcetera users by this
statement; I have a number of friends and family members who use
AOL. It's just that making things too easy to do without _learning_
and _thinking_ has this effect.)
Now, there is some user-friendliness that should be
increased... namely, those aspects that make it less likely that
the user will bother someone who isn't being paid for the job.
The mail controls bug recently mentioned here is a definite
example - having mail bouncing that's coming from someone you've
sent mail to is more of a problem for the blockee than the
blocker.
> Up until a few months ago, it took a fairly significant
>investment of money to get on the 'net -- probably something like
>$1000 for the computer, then you had to understand how to hook up a
>modem to it, and use whatever software (whether it's AOL or something
>else) to get online.
> But now, you've got WebTV. $300, and it does everything for you
>-- you just have to plug in three cables (one power, one video, one
>telephone). The ISP access provided by AT&T WorldNet (and the RBOCs)
>are going to create similar problems -- Internet "dialtone" for many
>people will now be provided by the same folks who provide their
>"voice dialtone".
Yeah. I'm worried about it too. I'm considering having
subscription by an approval-only process... and having the default
approval for WebTV, Juno, and (I'm afraid) AOL being no approval.
Unless someone's got someone else I know who'll recommend them, they
may not be able to get on my list. I don't want to do this... but I
will if I have to.
Incidentally, I'm not _that_ worried about the AT&T et al
stuff, unlike the WebTV et al. Quite simply, I doubt they're going
to be very good at being too user-friendly.
> You think eight million users creates a concentrated percentage
>of clueless users? Try 250 million, and that's just in the U.S.
Yeah. I don't know if educational systems, politics, etcetera
in Europe, Japan, et al will be worse or better than the ones in the
US. I suspect worse in the case of Europe (hand-holding like Germany's
belief that it will go Nazi again if it doesn't block _icons_ of
swasticas (see CorelDraw, as I recall), plus the overall welfare
state); I suspect something in between worse and better in the case of
Japan. (They seem likely (as a _vast_ (over)generalization) to be about
as clueless (educational systems based on memorization don't encourage
thinking), but not to be as noisy about it.)
> As a guy who sees the FAQ he currently maintains growing ad
>infinitum (as I dumb it down further and further, to try and answer
>more and more basic questions), I'm beginning to get quite
>disheartened here.
Same here. That's one reason that the mailing list I'm getting
ready to run (when grad school gives me the time...) will be called
Meritocracy.
> Does anyone have any ideas?
I'm sorry if I've been too discouraging, or too appearing of
trolling (I'm not, honest... not that such a claim does much good).
I'm not meaning to get into an argument, especially not on the list.
Some may call me cynical; I consider myself realistic. I'll be happy
to _discuss_ this with those of the optimist persuasion.
-Allen
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 13:46:57 1997
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To: list-managers@greatcircle.com
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
From: Tim Bowden
Message-ID:
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 97 11:16:10 PST
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Brad Knowles writes:
> At 1:29 PM -0500 1/30/1997, Dr. Manion wrote:
> >I believe that you missed the point. This is my experience. Your
> >experience may differ. However, my experience is that AOL has not
> >provided any benefit to the Internet as a whole. This is my opinion.
Examples? I'm not sure what Mother Theresa ISP might be expected to
perform for the neighborhood, other than provide access to her users
which did not overly burden the community at large. Should AOL
build a charity homeless hospital on the net, maybe for old
disgruntled Source users?
---
mailto:tcbowden@clovis.nerdnosh.org (Tim Bowden)
Proud member of NERDNOSH (tm)!
mailto:info@clovis.nerdnosh.org
http://www.corcom.com/reloj/Nerdnosh.html
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 13:50:31 1997
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To: list-managers@greatcircle.com
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
From: Tim Bowden
Message-ID: <0sii2D2w165w@clovis.nerdnosh.org>
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 97 11:03:57 PST
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Brad Knowles writes:
> We verify credit cards interactively. You cannot use a fake
> credit card number to get an AOL account. I'm not sure what else you
> might mean by "unverified accounts", though.
Possibly: a verified user simply switches his account name. He is
now BombasterX@aol.com. He sends a stream of garbage, perhaps even
a load of system demands to the last list he was justifiably kicked
off. He drops his alias before the material comes back, which of
course bounces, which of course adds a heavy load to the system
he's bombing, which was his intent.
Here's my experience: if I complain about an isolated user to AOL,
there is a chance I will see a rather prompt, courtesous, and helpful
reply. If I bring to them a possible liability, such as the above
(which I have), I will hear total silence. They will not so much
as acknowledge my mail.
Now, this may've been 1995, and it may have been rare, but there
was some dud on AOL sent a resource bomb as I've described to
bring down my small system, and AOL did not respond to my repeated
demands they take action and inform. I suspect from that the legal
department kicks in whenever there is potential for liability, and
I wonder if other listowners have seen that sort of non-response.
---
mailto:tcbowden@clovis.nerdnosh.org (Tim Bowden)
Proud member of NERDNOSH (tm)!
mailto:info@clovis.nerdnosh.org
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From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 13:55:34 1997
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To: list-managers@greatcircle.com
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
From: Tim Bowden
Message-ID:
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 97 10:40:33 PST
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Chuq Von Rospach writes:
> At 6:12 AM -0800 1/30/97, Brad Knowles wrote:
> > It's just the nature of the beast of large
> >communities -- we don't have any more than our share of clueless
> >customers (not much, anyway ;-), it's just that because we've got
> >eight million customers, we've got a lot more total clueless people
> >than other places.
>
> Hate to say it, Brad, but as someone who's defended AOL in the past, I
> have to now say -- I don't think so.
I think a good reference point to identify anyone is how they come
to be where they are. It works in parenting, politics, and `Hey,
dood, where you comin' from?'
Setting up a PPP account with most any other ISP is vastly different
than a simple dial-in you access because you picked up a glossy mag
at the newstand and a disk inviting you to follow the easy clicks
to Internet nirvana dropped on your shoes. When I first took up
the other accounts I have used, I had to go over docs just to
connect, and continue to read in order to stay aboard, and read
more to make the various parts work together.
It's precisely the problem in education - to raise self-esteem,
many are given the point-and-click option, yet when they arrive
where they are supposed to perform, they are lost. You can't
sell a product based strictly on glitzy ease-of-use and expect
to produce qualified engineers.
That said, let me also declare right here that I have seen some
avid, engaged feedback from support at AOL backstage, both
from the individuals who compile and keep current Mailing List
data and on the occasions when some garbage spews forth from
their vast army of unwashed users. They ain't ogres at AOL,
it's just that they're caught in this vast chain of events
partly caused by themselves, much like the New York Jets.
---
mailto:tcbowden@clovis.nerdnosh.org (Tim Bowden)
Proud member of NERDNOSH (tm)!
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From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 13:58:24 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 16:20:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Brock Rozen
To: Brad Knowles
Cc: CEO@Citadel.Net, list-managers@greatcircle.com
Subject: RE: Fresh horror from AOL
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On Sun, 2 Feb 1997, Brad Knowles wrote:
>
> If you want to help us in that process, please do. If you have a
> problem with some part of the system right now, if you bring that to
> our attention in a reasonably professional manner, we'll do
> everything we can to help you get that problem solved (given the
> physical constraints of how many seconds there are in a minute, how
> many minutes there are in a day, how many days there are in a year,
> how fast our vendors can roll hardware out their doors, etc...).
I have to agree with Brad on this, from experience. I'm not affiliated
with AOL, but I am a list-manager for two systems with tens of thousands
of subscribers. Whenever I've had a problem with AOL, I've approached Brad
and he's been very helpful to me.
Brad, if anything, I want to let you know that there's at least one person
out there who appreciates you and the people in your department.
> >There are all kinds of excuses that AOL has for their actions. They
> >have the resources to first run "controlled tests" of their email
> >before providing it. Whatever problems their email or subscribers
> >cause is still their responsibility *not* the responsibility of the
> >listowners who are providing service to everyone.
>
> We do controlled tests. In fact, from what I know of the sizes
> of the other largest systems on the 'net, our *test* systems are as
> large as or larger than the *production* systems of most of our
> competitors.
Also agreed. I know, as well as anybody else that deals with things on a
sysadmin level, there's only so much testing that can be done before the
test has to be put into testing on the public!
It's just a fact that when there's a bug in AOL it affects us so greatly
because we all have so many AOL subscribers. All this means is that they
(AOL) have to be more careful in bringing things to the public. Doesn't
mean they can't screw up once and awhile -- I know I have quite a few
times.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Brock Rozen | brozen@webdreams.com | http://www.webdreams.com/~brozen |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 14:01:34 1997
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From: "Dr. Manion"
Organization: Execu/Quest Marketing Consultants
To: list-managers@greatcircle.com
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 11:26:02 +0000
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Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Reply-to: CEO@Citadel.Net
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On 30 Jan 97 ,Brad Knowles insightfully wrote:
> At 12:09 PM -0500 1/22/1997, Dr. Manion wrote:
>
> >Juno, never gives me any problems but AOL is a constant source of
> >problems. Their people subscribe and then immediately start posting
> >messages to the list, "GET ME OFF THIS DAMN LIST!" etc..
>
> Just wait until they get bigger. I guarantee that you'll have
> precisely the same problems with AT&T WorldNet, WebTV, and anyone
> else who gets really big. It's just the nature of the beast of large
> communities -- we don't have any more than our share of clueless
> customers (not much, anyway ;-), it's just that because we've got
> eight million customers, we've got a lot more total clueless people
> than other places.
ROFL!
Again, I see that AOL doesn't want to take responsibility. "Well, if
you were as big as us -- you couldn't do anything either!" ROFL!
Thanks! I need a good laugh, today. Brad, you seem to have the same
mindset as AOL. In fact, your email is a prime example of AOL's
mindset. Simply stated, you don't want to take responsibility for
your actions. It's everyone else's fault but yours. "No one else can
do this or is doing this, so why should we?"
ROFL!
Thanks for proving what we all suspected.
> If you want another comparison, look at crime statistics for
> small towns of a few hundred or a few thousand people, and compare
> that to the largest cities in the world. They don't really have much
> more crimes of most types per capita, but because they have a lot
> more people, it seems that way.
Ahh, worthy of a good politician. Mis-direct the conversation to
something irrelevant. ROFL!
> If that's what you want. We can make sure that no mail from your
> site makes it into AOL, too.
oooo, a threat! ROFL!
Thanks, I have already taken those steps. As noted in a previous
email, I had a long discussion with the person who maintains the
AOL's directory of lists. It took awhile to be removed but we finally
did. But not after AOL trying to convince us how much we "needed"
them and how much we would benefit from their subscribers.
Again, illusions of gradeur. You assume AOL is "needed". It's not.
The Internet was here before AOL and it will be here after after AOL
follows the way of Prodigy, Genie and others.
Thanks for the entertaining email, Brad. Much appreciated. 8)
Leonard
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 14:04:38 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 13:13:35 -0800
To: Paul Hoffman , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Chuq Von Rospach
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users
Cc: Brad Knowles , Chuq Von Rospach
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At 10:36 AM -0800 2/2/97, Paul Hoffman wrote:
>Unfortunately, the same can be said for Apple and its employees, from my
>personal list management experience (I say "unfortunately" because I'm a
>card-carrying Mac enthusiast).
I don't disagree. There are idiots elsewhere. My email the last few
days proves this. What I found significant, and why I brought it up,
was how the percentages of "issues" coming from AOL users was so much
higher than I was seeing elsewhere. Not that AOL was the *only*
problem, or that problems were unique to it, but that the problems
coming out of AOL were out of proportion to the net as a whole.
We've argued back and forth about AOL ad nauseum, mostly with people on
one side or the other making broad statements based on personal
feelings. I finally have some real data that I think is useful to put
it in perspective. What we do with that data is still TBD....
>So, what can we do to educate the members of our lists? What can we do to
>reduce the problems caused by the users who can't/won't be educated about
>the basics? Is this an issue of education or enforcement?
Yes. First, a big key: "education" is not the answer. USENET has proven
this year in and year out for decades. You can only write so many
intros, so many FAQs, so many netiquettes. You can drop a horse in the
middle of a river, and he'll still die of thirst if he won't open his
mouth...
At some point, "education" loses economy of scale. It's like stereo
equiptment: the first $500 gets you 90% of the way, and then from
there, how close you want to get to 100% of the ultimate sound depends
only on how many zeroes you want to add to the price tag. At some
point, though, practically speaking, adding two more zeros to go from
97% to 97.5% doesn't make sense...
So education is *part* of the answer. Improved server technology is
another big key. Servers have to get better and working *with* users,
and guiding them out of traps and wrong behaviors, and nudging them in
the right direction, and feeding them *directed* help. Simply blatting
out a 10K help/FAQ file every time they throw a syntax error doesn't
solve the problem. Sending them one paragraph on what they did wrong,
how it ought to be done, and where to get more detail is, because it's
a *lot* more likely to be read.
I'll cover the "what can AOL do" in a different message, beacuse I'm
still mulling that over, but there are things that the service
providers can do to help improve user education and their own user
experience (and it may be some stuff as simple as better publicizing
existing programs, or making certain documentation easier to find), but
those of us who run these things have to realize that we're no longer
catering to technologically sophisticated users, and we need to improve
our systems as well. My current list server system (and documentation)
worked great 18 months ago when I implemented it. It hasn't fallen
apart -- but the needs of the users *have* changed significantly, and
so areas that used to not be a problem now are. Fault of the system?
The user? It's not the system's fault the users have changed and are
less technically aware. it is, however, the fault of the system that it
hasn't adapted to this....
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com)
( +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 14:12:29 1997
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From: Rich Kulawiec
Message-Id: <199701311712.MAA24038@itw.com>
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 12:12:46 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Brad Knowles" at Jan 30, 1997 09:17:26 AM
Reply-To: rsk@itw.com
Organization: Ditka Diplomatic Studies Institute
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Brad Knowles writes:
> Check the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ. That wouldn't get written
>without their support.
While I find the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ eminently useful, and am very
glad that it exists, there's no doubt in my mind that it would exist
even if AOL never had. It's too necessary not to.
>Check [...]
I know, I see them. But it's my impression that some/many of those
resources, such as the list you mentioned about SGML, are provided
by people who happen to be at AOL, not by AOL.
>In fact, there have been times when we've tried to give large sums
>of money to the authors of certain pieces of software, when it turned
>out that those authors didn't want money, but instead wanted something
>we weren't in a position to provide.
I think this may be because we're working under different paradigms.
I don't *want* large sums of money for running mailing lists, or
writing FAQs, or moderating newsgroups, or creating web-based resources,
or writing software, or any of the many things I've contributed since joining
the 'net in 1981. [Yes, since someone will ask, I did have a .arpa address.]
For example, not implementing poorly-thought-out mail filtering
or screwing up HTTP 1.1 support would be a good start [see attached ASCII
document] and respecting work done by non-AOLers (meaning leaving
copyrighted work intact including all attributions, so that it's easily
distinguishable from AOL's own work) would be nice.
Please understand clearly: I do not, except under extraordinary circumstances
such as security situations where I need their help, expect AOL to do
anything FOR me. I simply want them to stop doing things TO me.
> I'm sorry guy, if you want to rant and rave, go to alt.aol-sucks.
>Let's keep the conversations on this list to *useful* ones.
I'm sorry guy, I didn't "rant and rave". I gave my opinion, based
on many, many years of experience with the 'net and with AOL.
(If you want ranting and raving, ask me about Bobby Knight in
rec.sport.basketball.college. :-) ) You may not have found my remarks
useful, but other people seem to have, judging from the mail I've received.
---Rsk
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>From destiny@crl.com Sat Dec 28 05:11:27 1996
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From: David Cassel
To: The AOL List
Subject: The AOL List: War of the Web
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Status: RO
W a r o f t h e W e b
~~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~
Two weeks ago AOL implemented a new web procedure that blocked millions of
their users from thousands of sites.
The sites used HTML-compliant protocols, but AOL changed the way they were
handled December 14. Days later a webmaster complained that a colleague
"has to downgrade his entire site for these ninnies... AOL has no
work-around at present."
Ten days later, the situation persisted. Hiway technologies issued a
press release headlined "AOL Flubs HTTP/1.1 Support". In the crucial
pre-Christmas shopping week, AOL failed to address their incompatibility.
"[T]he fact that we are in full compliance means nothing to the millions
of AOL users that are being denied access by their own provider," Hiway
technologies complained, announcing a work-around they'd created
specifically for AOL's browser.
Within hours of the embarrassing press release, AOL fixed their problem.
But hard feelings lingered from their original response--an error message
which specifically stated--incorrectly--that "This is an issue with the
Web site, and not with AOL." The Apache web page displayed an AOL
executive's statement which implied that the action had been taken
deliberately: "We wanted to stem the tide of those faults proliferating
and becoming a de facto standard by blocking them now." As Apache saw it,
"we have a large company which is publicly snubbing consensus-developed
Internet standards". (They added that AOL is a member of the W3
Consortium, the organization which arrived at the very standard AOL
unilaterally failed to recognize!) A user wrote AOL's "AOL Insider"
columnist, "Can you please tell someone at AOL to fix this?!?!?!"
It couldn't have come at a worse time. "A year ago, we did not have a
terrific Web experience..." Steve Case conceded recently to Tech Wire.
"We had a mediocre browser and $3 an hour pricing." But Case went on to
boast "We now think we're shipping the best Web experience..." TechWire
named AOL "Company of the Year", but elsewhere, ranked the service #1 for
the top Web crash of 1996.
Addressing the blocked sites, an AOL executive told C|Net Monday, "The
company is aware of the problem and is working to rectify it." But
blissfully unaware, the AOL Insider continued to insist that "in this
case, the fault is not AOL's!" Incorrectly calling the web page hardware
an "experimental version of a Web server that doesn't support the Web
protocol correctly," they told readers Wednesday "You can write the
Webmaster of the site...to tell them there could potentially be 7+ million
more people seeing their site if they'd fix their problem. That'll light a
fire."
It lit a fire, all right... "IMHO, AOL is guilty of slander," one poster
noted on Usenet. The sys-op of a BBS in Atlanta commented, "They have
told more lies than all the presidents put together!" This isn't the
first time AOL sidestepped blame. Last year the 700-member "Undercover"
mailing list found that changes to AOL's mail client were preventing
mailing list posts from reaching AOL's users--and that AOL's staff were
blaming the mailing list operators.
And it isn't AOL's first move against the Web community. AOL is
encouraging fees on web sites run by their content providers--to make AOL
shine in comparison. But there's no guarantee content providers will go
along with the scheme. A spokesman for AOL's "Mom's Online"
area--featured prominently in AOL's television ads--told the AOL List, "As
I view the web as a critical distribution platform in our future, the
incentive AOL offers would have to be VERY compelling." The daily
columnist for Yahoo! Internet Life cited one AOL one content provider who
estimated that under such an arrangement, half AOL's existing partners
would leave the service, but another told them AOL's Robert Pittman would
still start reviewing all the existing relationships at the end of
January.
There are even more ominous signs. "America Online Inc.'s move to push
its content providers to offer exclusive content may not only be another
ploy to strengthen its lead as the dominant online service," wrote
Internet Week, "but is another signal that AOL actually wants to be the
World Wide Web." The deliberate vagueness of the company's tagline "AOL
is the internet," is only the first sign. Boasting about AOL's
subscribers to Wired magazine, Ted Leonsis insisted "To these 6 million
homes, we are the Web." Ironically, signing onto AOL tonight offered a
game that "lets you become part of the Borg Collective...and assimilate
every race in the universe, right on your desktop." ("Click on the ORDER
button now, and your purchase will be conveniently billed to your AOL
account," the post ended.)
Even removing a page from a web site doesn't remove it from the AOL
universe. Though the page may be gone, typing its URL into AOL's browser
returns the message "Please wait while that site is contacted."
Persisting in the charade, the browser then announces "Transferring
bytes"--and then displays a file which no longer exists...except on AOL's
machines in Virginia.
AOL stores copies of web pages to conceal the delays its service causes by
routing all requests through a chokepoint in Virginia--and users have no
way of knowing whether AOL has chosen to display a web page's current
version, or an old one. A recent trial-run returned the old version from
AOL's cache for at least a half an hour...and there's no way around it.
("Click here to RELOAD the current document," the browser offers
helpfully-- but rather than contacting the site, AOL simply re-displays
the old, cached version.)
This is an important caveat to AOL's claim of "fastest internet
experience". ("Based on having the America Online computer at room
temperature and the Internet Service computer in a refrigerator," one user
quipped.) And it can only get worse as system crowding increases. AOL
told the Washington Post they would promote the service less to improve
its capacity for current members--but TV ads are still urging users to
"Join today".
In fact, Robert Pittman recently commented that AOL had underestimated
demand when they moved to flat-rate pricing. "I wonder how they can make
money," the head of AT&T's Worldnet told the Wall Street Journal. Indeed,
Bloomberg recently reported that, less than one month into flat-rate
pricing, AOL is now considering charging for parts of their service--which
suggests that AOL is, in fact, losing money off their current pricing.
AOL's welcome screen have even begun heavily promoting their
pay-in-advance plan--and when TechWire asked Steve Case about ads in chat
rooms, Case responded, "That's something we'd consider."
Meanwhile, life goes on AOL. December 24 found a Christmas spam from
CyberPromotions--"have a wonderful holiday, and we'll see you soon, in an
e-mailbox near you!!"
THE LAST LAUGH
In celebration of the holidays, the webmaster at Green Bay Online created
a wreath made from AOL disks. (http://www.dct.com/gbol/whats_new/AOL.html)
"This is a 2.5 wreath," he told me. "The 3.0 wreath is on my garage."
David Cassel
More Information - http://www.wco.com/~destiny/time.htm
~~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~++~
Please forward with subscription information and headers in-tact.
To subscribe to this moderated list, send a message to MAJORDOMO@CLOUD9.NET
containing the phrase SUBSCRIBE AOL-LIST in the message body. To unsubscribe
send a message saying UNSUBSCRIBE AOL-LIST to MAJORDOMO@CLOUD9.NET
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From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 14:49:20 1997
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In-Reply-To:
References: "Dr. Manion"'s message
of Thu, 30 Jan 1997 18:34:06 +0000
<199701310031.TAA12683@www6.clever.net>
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 14:27:33 -0800
To: Brad Knowles , Jason L Tibbitts III ,
list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Chuq Von Rospach
Subject: Re: Missed point...
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At 11:19 PM -0800 2/1/97, Brad Knowles wrote:
> As we become more standard, we'll be fixing that last part.
>We've had to live with some legacy software for a while, and anytime
>you get yourselves into that kind of position, it takes a while to
>get it replaced. But we are working on that.
God, I know that one... It's even worse when you implemented the
legacy stuff yourself and have to live with the warts knowing who to
blame....
Let's *not* forget that this stuff ain't magic and you can't fix it
overnight. Especially if you can't afford to break mail for eight
million users. "oops, we're sorry" just doesn't cut it that well in
those situations... (grin)
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com)
( +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 14:53:31 1997
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References: Message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:55:42 -0500 from
list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 14:26:03 -0800
To: Eric Thomas ,
List Managers
From: Chuq Von Rospach
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
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At 7:11 AM -0800 2/2/97, Eric Thomas wrote:
>On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:55:42 -0500 Brad Knowles said:
>
>> Well, we already allow them 550 messages. Since we limit
>>Internet mail to a maximum of 2MB (assuming you're sending attachments),
>>this means we allow each user up to ~1.6GB mailbox storage space
>
>I have no problem with that, however it would be really nice if people
>were allowed to accumulate more mail as long as the total did not exceed
>20M or whatever quota you felt comfortable with.
Actually, I solved 99% of *this* problem for my AOL users simply by
making DIGEST the default for all of my busy lists. It cut my "mailbox
full" errors by a huge percentage (probably 80%), and I found out that
large percentage of my users loved digest mode, and didn't even realize
it existed, even though it's in the documentation...
In general, I'm finding that about 10-12% of my users switch to
individual messages. The rest stay in digest, either because they like
it or because they don't know there are alternatives because they
didn't read the instructions, but that latter group isn't complaining
about it, either...
And, frankly, DIGEST mode cuts down on my server load by a huge amount,
too, so I can serve a lot more mail to a lot more people with less
processing overhead.
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com)
( +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:14:12 1997
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References: Mike Nolan's message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 11:28:24 -0600
(CST) <199702021728.LAA12221@celery.tssi.com>
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:25:59 -0500
To: Paul Graham , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: AOL mailbox limit, hig volume lists in general
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At 1:40 PM -0500 2/2/1997, Paul Graham wrote:
>despite my profound annoyance at the way aol works at least their bounce
>format can be trivially converted to dsn (so why don't they do it?).
That change is already under development, and will hopefully
arrive when the new Internet Mail gateway system goes into production.
As for the current system, you have to pass back the DSN
information out-of-bands to the MTA, and right now we have no way of
doing that -- all the bounce text is generated on the back-end
mainframe, and effectively sent out as a brand new message.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:16:50 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 23:49:53 +0100
From: Eric Thomas
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
To: List Managers
In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:22:05 -0500 from Brad Knowles
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On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:22:05 -0500 Brad Knowles said:
> If you now want to see if they're over a certain quantity of
>mail, measured in bytes, instead of just slicing through the mailbox and
>counting how long it takes you to get to the end, you now have to store
>message size along with the pointer to the message, and run an
>accumulated total as you're walking down that tree. It doesn't sound
>like much, but do it tens of millions of times a day, and you'll quickly
>accumulate a lot more CPU time than you thought possible.
This is an implementation problem that can be solved in all sorts of
ways, such as maintaining a "total size of mailbox" field in the mailbox
header or whatever makes sense given your existing implementation. As one
of my former bosses used to say when I explained that his latest bright
idea wasn't going to work, "Stop! I don't want to hear any of that. This
stuff is your job, not mine. My job is to decide if we can afford it, so
just tell me who would have to work on it for how long and what hardware
we would need to buy, and I'll give you an answer".
> We'd probably have to add several dozen more terabytes of disk
>storage (because the average mailbox size would grow *dramatically*),
That's a valid argument, but you can charge extra for the service, or you
can contain the growth by adding a higher per-message cap. To tell you
the truth, I think most people would be happy with 1000-1500 total. It's
just that if you divide 500 by the number of days in a long weekend, it's
less than what most active lists produce a day. People then lose personal
mail and get upset.
Eric
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:19:50 1997
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References: Message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:55:42 -0500 from
list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:22:05 -0500
To: Eric Thomas ,
List Managers
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
At 10:11 AM -0500 2/2/1997, Eric Thomas wrote:
>On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:55:42 -0500 Brad Knowles said:
>
>> Well, we already allow them 550 messages. Since we limit
>>Internet mail to a maximum of 2MB (assuming you're sending attachments),
>>this means we allow each user up to ~1.6GB mailbox storage space
>
>I have no problem with that, however it would be really nice if people
>were allowed to accumulate more mail as long as the total did not exceed
>20M or whatever quota you felt comfortable with. Maybe even as a premium
>service costing another $2/month or whatever.
One problem, as I see it, is that it is easy to count how many
messages are in someone's mailbox (just look at how many pointers
they have to messages), and if they're over a certain number, then
they've got a full mailbox. This is something you can do very
quickly.
If you now want to see if they're over a certain quantity of
mail, measured in bytes, instead of just slicing through the mailbox
and counting how long it takes you to get to the end, you now have to
store message size along with the pointer to the message, and run an
accumulated total as you're walking down that tree. It doesn't sound
like much, but do it tens of millions of times a day, and you'll
quickly accumulate a lot more CPU time than you thought possible.
We'd probably have to add several dozen more terabytes of disk
storage (because the average mailbox size would grow *dramatically*),
and it takes a lot of work just trying to find space, power, and
cooling for that kind of equipment.
What it would cost to add this to the billing software is another
matter -- we might need several dollars per month additional just to
cover the overhead incurred by having to add this to our billing
procedure (including the overhead of having to go through and count
how many messages/how much space each of our eight million-plus users
is taking up).
I'll pass this on to our developers, but it's not something we
could just drop in overnight. We might have to redesign the way we
store our mailboxes, and would certainly have to not only get out
from behind the current eight-ball, but get far enough ahead of it
that we can then take a major performance hit (by adding this
feature) and still be far enough ahead that we don't get behind it
again.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:22:58 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:38:37 -0500
To: "E. Allen Smith"
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror
from AOL)
Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
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At 1:33 PM -0500 2/2/1997, E. Allen Smith wrote:
> What proportion of _new_ (say, have used Internet email for less
>than 3 months total) users does AOL have, both as a proportion of AOL users
>and as a proportion of new users on the Internet?
Numbers over the last three months, especially with regards to
simply being on the Service versus actually making use of
sending/receiving Internet mail, are statistics I don't have, and I
don't know who would.
We probably have some numbers somehwere of how many members we've
added over the last three months, but I know that over the last six
to nine months, we've added about three million users.
> In other words, most people today can't figure something out from
>simple pre-packaged information; they have to be hand-held. And with a
>lot lower proportion of experienced to new users on AOL (and on the other
>quickly-expanding services you mention below), the hand-holding doesn't
>happen.
The problem is that the Customer Service folks get the same kind
of cluelessness and vitriol for virtually *everything*, as
list-managers get when AOL users demand that they take time out of
their busy schedule to solve their problems, because that's what they
were put on this planet for. In fact, I suspect we see more of it,
and in general, worse cases of it, than list-managers typically do.
Less hand-holding certainly doesn't work, because then we get
more cluelessness and vitriol that we aren't doing enough to help.
More hand-holding certainly doesn't work, because then we get
cluelessness and vitriol about the eleventy quadzillion other things
we *didn't* fix when we added some new specific feature.
So, what? Turn off the entire Service and send everyone home?
Well, similar problems (perhaps not quite as bad, but certainly bad
enough) exist on the Internet already, so why not just turn off the
entire Internet and send everyone home -- that's just as valid a
solution. In fact, since we know that virtually all of them are
incapable of correcting that bloody little blinking "12:00" on their
VCRs, why not just turn off the entire power grid for the whole
world, and send everyone home?
There has to be some sort of intermediate solution, but I haven't
been able to come up with one, and I certainly haven't seen one get
created to help solve the same kinds of problems as are pre-existant
on the Internet already (otherwise we would have already adopted
something similar on AOL). This is a tough problem, and so far, no
one seems to have come up with any real solutions.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:26:21 1997
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From: "Gess Shankar"
Organization: Earth Channel Communications LLC
To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:55:13 -0500
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror from
Reply-to: gess@earthchannel.com
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On 2 Feb 97 at 14:33, E. Allen Smith wrote:
> In other words, most people today can't figure something out from
> simple pre-packaged information; they have to be hand-held. And with a
> lot lower proportion of experienced to new users on AOL (and on the other
> quickly-expanding services you mention below), the hand-holding doesn't
> happen.
>
Allen hits the nail right on the head with this one. Most people
either can't figure out or just can't be bothered to make the
attempt, even if they can. Whether politics has anything to do or
not, it is a cultural problem. I doubt if there are any quick fixes.
Anything more than short phrases or something like a Dave Letterman
top ten list is too much trouble to read, understand, and then act
upon. With the growth of Internet, written communication manifested
itself on an unsuspecting public, raised on television. Web,
initially an information treasure trove, made friendlier by hypertext
and links, is slowly turning into yet another mindnumbing tv clone.
My hopes that literacy would increase because of the net are being
dashed. :-(
Email is still a relic of the past, enforcing one to do archaic
things - like actually reading textual matter and comprehending,
creating command lines consisting of multiple words - some of them
unspellable like SUBSCRIBE and even worse UNSUBSCRIBE. (Didn't
we get away from the nasty MSDOS to avoid have to type such things?
Don't even mention uniks) Either list manager software will get
better in parsing, using AI, telepathy etc., or lists will soon be
used by a few - rather like the book reading public. There will
always be one. Volunteer list owners will probably cater only to this
audience - the unwashed masses preferring to use point and click web
based boards, IRC and such. After all, email has to be read and for
participation, one has to actually write something. I think this is
the reason that "chats" are more popular - it is more like small
talk. No Zen like deep thoughts or large vocabulary required. :-)
Looking at the current trends, free email lists may start to
disappear, as MUAs get more TV like - multimedia MIME mail complete
with animated, audible ad banners and neat boxes to fill your
credit card number in. At best, there may be a cult following for
discussion oriented lists, rather like the book buying public. What
can I say, I am a pessimist too. May be because I am involved in the
adult learning process as an occasional trainer. :-)
Educating large masses of users who don't want to learn will be the
challenge of the next millennium.
Gess
PS: I used to insist that subscribers learn to spell or cut and paste
words like SUBSCRIBE or use available aliases like JOIN and LEAVE.
But repeated usage of SUSCRIBE/SUSCRIVE and other creative
spellings has forced me to accept all these, as a gesture towards
being more "user-friendly". Now working on "GET ME OFF THIS STINKING
LIST" and variations thereof. :-)
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:28:03 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:17 EDT
From: "E. Allen Smith"
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror from AOL)
To: brad@his.com
Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Message-id: <01IEY7G1UD2S9AN0LG@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
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From: IN%"brad@his.com" "Brad Knowles" 2-FEB-1997 17:54:40.87
> We probably have some numbers somehwere of how many members we've
>added over the last three months, but I know that over the last six
>to nine months, we've added about three million users.
Yeek... no wonder you're having problems. You have my distinct
sympathies, given that it's the higher-up's fault and not yours that
you've expanded too fast.
> The problem is that the Customer Service folks get the same kind
>of cluelessness and vitriol for virtually *everything*, as
>list-managers get when AOL users demand that they take time out of
>their busy schedule to solve their problems, because that's what they
>were put on this planet for. In fact, I suspect we see more of it,
>and in general, worse cases of it, than list-managers typically do.
I'm not surprised by the latter, or, indeed, by the former.
The Customer Service people have the problem that, indeed, they
_are_ getting paid for taking the cluelessness and vitriol, so
you've got a distinctly greater obligation to put up with it and
help the users out. One wonders if putting in a limit on the
amount of Customer Service time/email messages/whatever would
work - or at least a limit on how much you'll do without further
charges - with, of course, the exception of if AOL's doing something
wrong and not the user. People shriek and scream about software
companies doing that, but the companies in question seem to have
no other choice. I wonder if rapidly-expanding online services
may be the same way. I'd wonder how much of AOL's budget is
currently going to _paying_ for Customer Service.
In other words, I see an analogy between unlimited Internet
hours and unlimited Customer Service. Both get overused for the
capacity of the system. It's just that the capacity for the
Customer Service system effectively includes the rest of the
Internet... and thus that's what gets dumped on when it gets
overloaded. How often does Customer Service get questions that
should have gone to a list owner... or should have been resolved
by reading a _non-AOL_ list's subscription information?
> Less hand-holding certainly doesn't work, because then we get
>more cluelessness and vitriol that we aren't doing enough to help.
>More hand-holding certainly doesn't work, because then we get
>cluelessness and vitriol about the eleventy quadzillion other things
>we *didn't* fix when we added some new specific feature.
I see the catch-22, yes. I wasn't proposing a simple
solution... just a switch in priorities from things helpful to the
likely-to-be-forever-clueless to things helpful for everyone. I'm
not claiming that this will solve everything, merely that it _might_
help.
> So, what? Turn off the entire Service and send everyone home?
>Well, similar problems (perhaps not quite as bad, but certainly bad
>enough) exist on the Internet already, so why not just turn off the
>entire Internet and send everyone home -- that's just as valid a
>solution. In fact, since we know that virtually all of them are
>incapable of correcting that bloody little blinking "12:00" on their
>VCRs, why not just turn off the entire power grid for the whole
>world, and send everyone home?
I certainly wasn't proposing the first; I'd prefer to see
AOL keep existing, even with the problems, than it (and the other
major internet providers) go out. For one thing, there are quite
a lot of competent AOL users - some of them my friends and
family. The same thing goes even more for the Internet in general
and the power grid in general.
> There has to be some sort of intermediate solution, but I haven't
>been able to come up with one, and I certainly haven't seen one get
>created to help solve the same kinds of problems as are pre-existant
>on the Internet already (otherwise we would have already adopted
>something similar on AOL). This is a tough problem, and so far, no
>one seems to have come up with any real solutions.
Yeah, I know. I sometimes think that, partially thanks to hype
and partially thanks to real uses, the Internet in general is expanding
too fast... not for its physical capacity (a la "The Death of the
Internet... GIFs at 11"), but for its social capacity. The problem is
how to expand that capacity and/or slow down the growth to a bearable
rate. Chuq has proposed a few changes in the realm of this list,
namely smarter servers with more intelligent error messages, improved
list subscription, and improved list filtering. What are some others?
-Allen
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:30:44 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:47 EDT
From: "E. Allen Smith"
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror from AOL)
To: chuqui@plaidworks.com
Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Message-id: <01IEY6EK60WU9AN0LG@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
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From: IN%"chuqui@plaidworks.com" "Chuq Von Rospach" 2-FEB-1997 17:30:10.54
>I can't speak for AOL on this, but looking at the outside, I see a
>*lot* of address churn from AOL. Folks sign up for AOL, and within a
>few days/weeks/months, the account dies or I get mail saying "I have a
>real address now, please change my subscription...." (real is my
>editorial, but it's suprising how many are pretty close to that). There
>*is* a strong case of AOL being a place people start and outgrow, from
>what I see, or who show up, poke around, and go away again.
That's about what I suspected.
>There *is* a place that's worse than AOL on this show-up-and-disappear
>churn. It's worldnet.att.com. I don't get a *lot* of subscriptions from
>that place (which indicates it's not overly successful...), but I *can*
>guarantee that almost all of the worldnet addresses that do sign up
>don't seem to stay long. That indicates to me that service is not
>terribly well liked by users, because I see lots of running for the
>foxholes there.
That's interesting in terms of Brad's worries re: AT&T proving
net service for lots of people. As I mentioned, I doubt that they're
going to provide enough _unnecessary_ handholding to cause too much
of a problem... on the other hand, they also seem likely to be not
providing even the _necessary_ handholding stuff.
>> I would personally attribute this to A. failures in the educational
>>system;
>Don't necessarily blame AOL for this (or *just* AOL) -- first thing ANY
>of my lsits do when someone signs up is send them instructions. If the
>first thing *they* do is throw those instructions away unread, no
>educational system AOL comes up with is going to make significant
>inroads, either. As I like to say, throw a horse in the middle of the
>river, and it'll still die of thirst if it refuses to to open it's damn
>mouth...
Whoops... I should have been clearer here. I was referring
to the _US_ educational system; it seems to me to encourage this
attitude, particularly in the public schools. (As I stated, I'm
not as familiar with non-US educational systems, but I suspect the
same is true in general.)
>And let's also keep one thing in perspective: in general, we're talking
>about the 1-2% of the list that causes problems. I'd say 90% compliance
>is an easy target here, and on most lists, it's probably over 95%. It's
>the very noisy few driving us crazy here, and some of them simply won't
>be reachable no matter how many batteries you attach to your cattle
>prod.
Quite... and as lists get potentially larger as the Internet
expands, this means there's going to be more of a problem, let alone
the proportion-of-newbies problem I also mentioned.
>We also need to keep in mind that we want to design systems that don't
>*screw over* taht 95% of non-trouble-makers in search of a magical
>solution for that last few percent who won't cooperate anyway... Let's
>not make it tough for people who do behave, or turn them into
>troublemakers -- shades of the good old days of software copy
>protection that assumed all of us were pirates and made it hard to
>actually USE the products legally... We need to keep the entire
>situation in view, lest the cure be worse than the disease...
Agreed. I'm not proposing making things _purposefully_
difficult in general, just that the large online services should
focus less on user-friendliness and more on functioning well in
other ways - including functioning better for users that know what
they're doing, or at least are willing to learn.
>Handholding, yes. Setting things up so people can fire up a drag racer
>before they have their drivers license -- those are the problems you
>need to watch out for in making things "easy", beacuse a few of those
>people are going to fire up that drag racer and proceed to roll it over
>into the grandstands. It's not *just* users taking themselves out, they
>tend to take others with them. (if they just were to drive that drag
>racer over a cliff, I'd call that "improving the gene pool".... grin)
Chuckle... you might find the DARWIN-L list (on yorku.ca) amusing. It's
largely stories of people doing exactly that - improving the gene pool
by taking themselves out of it.
>email mailbacks of subscription confirmations -- you don't get
>subscribed until I get mail back saying you really wanted to. The
>spammers have made that one necessary. It *also* gives me an
>opportunity to force documentation into their faces before they go on
>the lists, so there's no way they can claim they never saw anything. If
>nothing else, this just gives me a firmer stance on being able to
>enforce things, so there's less argument about people being kicked off.
IIRC, the latest version of Majordomo does this, with a
cookie. I'm not sure if it has that documentation included - that would
be a good feature idea.
>My lists have huge international audiences. In general, I have fewer
>problems overseas, but it's not absolute. They generally have a higher
>level of education, but language issues come into play, and frankly,
>twits will be twits, whether they're American, Swedish, Finnish or
>Italian. I get a few, but most of the problems I see in a place like
>Italy are more language issues where maybe easier/simpler documentation
>might help, while in Sweden where English is a priority second
>language, most of my problems tend to be the occasional twit.
Interesting. I wonder how much of it is that the higher level
of education (probably due to more monetary resources needed to get on
the 'net) and how much cultural differences resulting in less overt
cluelessness/twitdom and more "suffering" in silence?
>There are no easy answers. We've implemented all of those.... But that
>doesn't mean we've done all we can...
Good point. Noticeably, all the easy answers deal with things
directly under our control; the more difficult stuff is dealing with
the doings of others.
-Allen
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:32:52 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 14:20:53 -0800
To: "E. Allen Smith" , brad@his.com
From: Chuq Von Rospach
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror
from AOL)
Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
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At 10:33 AM -0800 2/2/97, E. Allen Smith wrote:
> What proportion of _new_ (say, have used Internet email for less
>than 3 months total) users does AOL have, both as a proportion of AOL users
>and as a proportion of new users on the Internet?
I can't speak for AOL on this, but looking at the outside, I see a
*lot* of address churn from AOL. Folks sign up for AOL, and within a
few days/weeks/months, the account dies or I get mail saying "I have a
real address now, please change my subscription...." (real is my
editorial, but it's suprising how many are pretty close to that). There
*is* a strong case of AOL being a place people start and outgrow, from
what I see, or who show up, poke around, and go away again.
If an AOL account lasts longer than about two months, it's likely to
stick around a long time. But there's a lot of turnover early.
There *is* a place that's worse than AOL on this show-up-and-disappear
churn. It's worldnet.att.com. I don't get a *lot* of subscriptions from
that place (which indicates it's not overly successful...), but I *can*
guarantee that almost all of the worldnet addresses that do sign up
don't seem to stay long. That indicates to me that service is not
terribly well liked by users, because I see lots of running for the
foxholes there.
> I would personally attribute this to A. failures in the educational
>system;
Don't necessarily blame AOL for this (or *just* AOL) -- first thing ANY
of my lsits do when someone signs up is send them instructions. If the
first thing *they* do is throw those instructions away unread, no
educational system AOL comes up with is going to make significant
inroads, either. As I like to say, throw a horse in the middle of the
river, and it'll still die of thirst if it refuses to to open it's damn
mouth...
And let's also keep one thing in perspective: in general, we're talking
about the 1-2% of the list that causes problems. I'd say 90% compliance
is an easy target here, and on most lists, it's probably over 95%. It's
the very noisy few driving us crazy here, and some of them simply won't
be reachable no matter how many batteries you attach to your cattle
prod.
We also need to keep in mind that we want to design systems that don't
*screw over* taht 95% of non-trouble-makers in search of a magical
solution for that last few percent who won't cooperate anyway... Let's
not make it tough for people who do behave, or turn them into
troublemakers -- shades of the good old days of software copy
protection that assumed all of us were pirates and made it hard to
actually USE the products legally... We need to keep the entire
situation in view, lest the cure be worse than the disease...
> Well, A. convince the marketing people not to expand so fast
>(the recent debacle with expanding too fast in terms of hardware
yeah, right... (grin)
>they're thinking about things like this); and B. don't make things
>so easy for within-service stuff.
True. You *can* make things *too easy*. I've had to make some of my
stuff a bit less convenient (my /listadmin/ web CGI form for instance,
which I had to move to radio buttons and force people to make each
subscription request separately. Why? Because too many users simply
signed up for *everything*, and proceeded to drown in the onslaught of
mail. It was too easy to get in trouble, so I had to make things a bit
less easy to force them to make decisions instead of just pushing all
the buttons and seeing what happens...)
Sometimes it's as simple as putting the stuff behind a page that has
the information you want them to read first. You go to the mailing list
page on AOL, and before you can look at lists or subscribe to things,
there's a page with things like "BEFORE YOU SIGN UP FOR MAILING LISTS"
and "HOW TO GET HELP IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE WITH A MAILING LIST" pages of
documentation. In large, purple blinking text. Even if they just skip
past it, hopefully, some percentage will remember it's there so if they
do get in trouble, they can find it again. It's a matter of presenting
the information so that what you want them to see doesn't get lost in
the sea of what they're looking for... This is something I'm
investigating as I start my redesign of *my* stuff for the next
generation. The ListADmin page is going to morph pretty seriously, I
think, to better present data without huge globs of text nobody reads.
Handholding, yes. Setting things up so people can fire up a drag racer
before they have their drivers license -- those are the problems you
need to watch out for in making things "easy", beacuse a few of those
people are going to fire up that drag racer and proceed to roll it over
into the grandstands. It's not *just* users taking themselves out, they
tend to take others with them. (if they just were to drive that drag
racer over a cliff, I'd call that "improving the gene pool".... grin)
> Yeah. I'm worried about it too. I'm considering having
>subscription by an approval-only process... and having the default
My next system will do two things, guaranteed:
email mailbacks of subscription confirmations -- you don't get
subscribed until I get mail back saying you really wanted to. The
spammers have made that one necessary. It *also* gives me an
opportunity to force documentation into their faces before they go on
the lists, so there's no way they can claim they never saw anything. If
nothing else, this just gives me a firmer stance on being able to
enforce things, so there's less argument about people being kicked off.
all lists become at least semi-moderated. By semi-moderated, nothing
gets posted unless one of two things is true: the user has been placed
in the approved-poster list (which happens when the moderator agrees
they have their act together and doesn't need to be watched; in
general, this would mean they send mail requesting validation and that
they've read and understood the rules of posting), or if a moderator
sees and approves the mail. Users won't need to be approved, but they'd
have to put up with delays. In reality, a big reason I'm heading to
this is so that when I do run into a user who starts mucking with the
list I can cut off automatic postings and force them to be approved on
a message by message basis. Some users just won't cooperate with
netiquette without an appropriate cattle prod, and this is the one I
plan on using -- "good" posters won't have to go through the moderator,
but anyone who's new, unproven or proven to cause problems will. Seems
like a nice tradeoff, and it doesn't force the person who only posts
once a month to go through the validation hassle....
And if you think about it, it'll stop those admin messages that might
sneak through the server filters, because the folks who *do* post them
won't know enough to get validated in the first place, so they show up
in the moderator's pile instead....
>> You think eight million users creates a concentrated percentage
>>of clueless users? Try 250 million, and that's just in the U.S.
>
> Yeah. I don't know if educational systems, politics, etcetera
>in Europe, Japan, et al will be worse or better than the ones in the
>US.
My lists have huge international audiences. In general, I have fewer
problems overseas, but it's not absolute. They generally have a higher
level of education, but language issues come into play, and frankly,
twits will be twits, whether they're American, Swedish, Finnish or
Italian. I get a few, but most of the problems I see in a place like
Italy are more language issues where maybe easier/simpler documentation
might help, while in Sweden where English is a priority second
language, most of my problems tend to be the occasional twit.
Let's not forget that America's basically the only country that's proud
of being monolingual. Most of Europe learns at least two languages, and
in many instances, the second or third language is English. but I don't
want to digress into american educational systems arguments.....
>> Does anyone have any ideas?
>
> I'm sorry if I've been too discouraging, or too appearing of
>trolling (I'm not, honest... not that such a claim does much good).
There are no easy answers. We've implemented all of those.... But that
doesn't mean we've done all we can...
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com)
( +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 15:58:05 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 15:11:11 -0800
To: CEO@Citadel.Net, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Chuq Von Rospach
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
Dr. Manion: I'm curious. Since you're so down on AOL and how it doesn't
contribute to teh net (or what it does contirubte you choose to not
value, a very different thing...)
What have YOU and your group contributed to the net such that you can
lob stones at AOL's glass house and feel virtuous about it? Your name
and organization don't ring a bell to me. Why have you made the
internet such a better place that you can dump on AOL from a position
of righteousness?
Or is this a case of "don't do what I do, do what I say?" Because I can
name a lot of things AOL's put time and energy into -- I'd like to know
what *you've* done along those lines as well, so I can be appropriately
impressed about your knowledge and contributions to us.
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com)
( +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 16:10:45 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:50:07 -0500
To: "E. Allen Smith"
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror
from AOL)
Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 5:17 PM -0500 2/2/1997, E. Allen Smith wrote:
> I'd wonder how much of AOL's budget is
>currently going to _paying_ for Customer Service.
They are 4500 employees out of probably 5500 or 6000 total by
now. They are far-and-away the biggest part of the company. We're
paying *big* bucks to do the best we can for Customer Service.
> How often does Customer Service get questions that
>should have gone to a list owner... or should have been resolved
>by reading a _non-AOL_ list's subscription information?
I don't work in customer service, so I don't know those numbers.
I suspect it's quite high, but I also know that we get a lot of those
"Why doesn't my foot pedal work?" or "Why did your f**^&*&%^*&$g
system stop working, and what the hell is this damn "0/1" switch
anyway?" type questions.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 16:14:23 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:57:59 -0500
From: jeffw@smoe.org (Jeff Wasilko)
To: chuqui@plaidworks.com (Chuq Von Rospach)
Cc: EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU (E. Allen Smith), brad@his.com,
list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror from AOL)
References: <01IEXZM61XYW9AN0LG@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
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In-Reply-To: ; from "Chuq Von Rospach" on Feb 2, 1997 14:20:53 -0800
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Chuq Von Rospach writes:
> email mailbacks of subscription confirmations -- you don't get
> subscribed until I get mail back saying you really wanted to. The
> spammers have made that one necessary. It *also* gives me an
> opportunity to force documentation into their faces before they go on
> the lists, so there's no way they can claim they never saw anything. If
> nothing else, this just gives me a firmer stance on being able to
> enforce things, so there's less argument about people being kicked off.
I implemented confirmations after one of my lists was abused
repeatedly as a weapon-of-mass-subscription.
I've found that it has the nice side effect of weeding out people
who can't follow instructions. Of the 106 people with pending
subscriptions, 25% are from AOL. And the majority of those are
older than 24 hours (pending confirmations are valid for 2
weeks).
-jeff
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 16:27:35 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 19:08:20 -0500
To: "E. Allen Smith" , chuqui@plaidworks.com
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror
from AOL)
Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 4:47 PM -0500 2/2/1997, E. Allen Smith wrote:
> IIRC, the latest version of Majordomo does this, with a
>cookie. I'm not sure if it has that documentation included - that would
>be a good feature idea.
I believe that Majordomo borrowed that idea from Listserv. You
can also add to that a requirement that the list manager approve all
subscriptions, and with that kind of system in place, it's going to
be hard for people to get through if they aren't sufficiently
literate and intelligent (which would eliminate all junkmailers, too).
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 16:30:34 1997
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References: Message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:22:05 -0500 from Brad
Knowles
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:54:44 -0500
To: Eric Thomas ,
List Managers
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
At 5:49 PM -0500 2/2/1997, Eric Thomas wrote:
>This is an implementation problem that can be solved in all sorts of
>ways, such as maintaining a "total size of mailbox" field in the mailbox
>header or whatever makes sense given your existing implementation.
Then you've got to update that number every time you insert a new
message, delete an old one, etc.... The same amount of work would be
required, though.
>That's a valid argument, but you can charge extra for the service, or you
>can contain the growth by adding a higher per-message cap. To tell you
>the truth, I think most people would be happy with 1000-1500 total. It's
>just that if you divide 500 by the number of days in a long weekend, it's
>less than what most active lists produce a day. People then lose personal
>mail and get upset.
1000 or 1500 might be fine for now, but I guarantee you that it
wouldn't last -- probably a month or two, then people would start
subscribing to even more high-traffic lists (because now the problem
doesn't happen any more) and then we're right back where we were.
If more people subscribed to digests for everything, this problem
would be virtually non-existant. Maybe that should be part of your
test to see if someone should be allowed to do more advanced things
-- can they figure out how to get themselves switched from digest
mode to reflector mode (and figure out how to deal with the
consequences when it blows up in their face)?
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 16:33:43 1997
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Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 01:02:58 +0100
From: Eric Thomas
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
To: List Managers
In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:54:44 -0500 from Brad Knowles
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:54:44 -0500 Brad Knowles said:
> 1000 or 1500 might be fine for now, but I guarantee you that it
>wouldn't last -- probably a month or two, then people would start
>subscribing to even more high-traffic lists (because now the problem
>doesn't happen any more) and then we're right back where we were.
No because there's a limit to how much e-mail people are willing to read
per day. I'm not saying it wouldn't go past 1000 or 1500, but at some
point it would very definitely stop expanding.
> If more people subscribed to digests for everything, this
>problem would be virtually non-existant.
Yeah but digests are so much trouble that I wouldn't even dream of this.
There are just too many people with accounts at ISPs that can't handle a
HUGE 50k digest. Sometimes they dump the whole message on the floor,
sometimes they cut it in the middle. The users expect you to know why and
be able to fix it. Sure, you can lower the digest size to 10k, but then
people who have a real e-mail account complain that they want to get 1-2
digests per day, not 10. Or you can make the digest size configurable at
a significant resource cost, and you're left with clueless people who
don't know how to reduce or increase the default value, as the case might
be (there is no direct relationship between the cluelessness of the user
and that of the ISP).
Personally I'd rather get 1000 bounces a day as a result of not using
digest by default than 20 complaints a day about missing digests. I can
program my computer to take care of the bounces, in fact I now use
probing on most of the lists I run and I don't see any bounce, and in the
next version of LISTSERV transparent probing will be the default and
everything will happen under the hood where it belongs, you'll just need
a bit more horsepower than when you do all the processing manually.
Between that and the major players (like AOL) moving to DSN, I think
bounces will soon be a problem of the past. But when people ask about
their digest, I can't have the computer answer for me, not today and
probably not in 10 years either. So, on the lists I run, I make sure
digest is not the default option so that it is only used by people who
will know how to turn it off.
Eric
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 16:36:54 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:09:09 -0500
To: CEO@Citadel.Net, list-managers@greatcircle.com
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
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At 6:26 AM -0500 1/30/1997, Dr. Manion wrote:
>ROFL!
>Again, I see that AOL doesn't want to take responsibility. "Well, if
>you were as big as us -- you couldn't do anything either!" ROFL!
I'm saying that it is acknowledged as a very tough problem, and
by a lot of people I consider to be fairly knowledgable in the area.
Some of those people work at AOL, many don't. When there is good
consensus that a problem is hard, no amount of whining on your part
is going to help solve it. You've got to make an actual
contribution. I haven't seen that from you.
I guarantee you that AOL will implement whatever solutions we can
to this problem as soon as we can, but that means that the solutions
have to be invented by someone, and although we've got some pretty
sharp people, we certainly don't have the corner on experts. As soon
as solutions (partial or otherwise) present themselves (or as soon as
we can come up with them on our own), we'll feed them to our
developers for implementation. It's that simple.
But, we're not Microsoft. We can't buy the entire Internet, and
declare all of it's problems solved overnight because you will now
only be allowed to connect using Microsoft products. It just doesn't
work that way, and if that's the kind of magical overnight solution
you want for your problems, please go dream somewhere else. The rest
of us have real work to do.
>Again, illusions of gradeur. You assume AOL is "needed". It's not.
>The Internet was here before AOL and it will be here after after AOL
>follows the way of Prodigy, Genie and others.
AOL may or may not survive. Whether it does is irrelevant. We
are here now, and the whole Internet has some very hard problems to
solve, and since we're the biggest kid on the block, that means we
have more of that problem to solve than anyone else, but that doesn't
mean that we have any more answers to that problem than anyone else.
The whole Internet community is going to have to solve this
problem, whether we can find a solution for our part of it or not.
If the whole Internet community (AOL included) can come up with some
improvements, I'm sure that one way or another, they will get shared
and copied around so that everyone can benefit (reverse engineer
them, if you have to).
If you want to be a part of this solution, please do so.
Otherwise, you're part of the problem, and you should get out of the
way.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 16:40:21 1997
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References: from "Brad
Knowles" at Jan 30, 1997 09:17:26 AM
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To: rsk@itw.com, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
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At 12:12 PM -0500 1/31/1997, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
>Brad Knowles writes:
>> Check the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ. That wouldn't get written
>>without their support.
>
>While I find the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ eminently useful, and am very
>glad that it exists, there's no doubt in my mind that it would exist
>even if AOL never had. It's too necessary not to.
See my previous comments. I guarantee you that it would have
died on the vine. There simply was zero interest in keeping the
thing up to date, until I took the thing over. Were I to let it go
now, it probably would survive, but not if I'd done so back then.
>I know, I see them. But it's my impression that some/many of those
>resources, such as the list you mentioned about SGML, are provided
>by people who happen to be at AOL, not by AOL.
AOL pays for the hardware, including the power, space, cooling,
etc.... AOL pays the paychecks of its employees, and some of us tend
to be pretty activist towards certain types of things, and that's
part of why we were hired, and that is officially considered part (or
all) of our job while at AOL. It's part of my official job
description, if nothing else.
I'd say that this qualifies as AOL providing the resources.
Ultimately, everything is done by people, of course -- people wrote
Unix, people wrote the HTML spec, people wrote programs to be used by
other people to do things like surf the 'net. Ultimately, everything
is done by people, directly or indirectly.
What you have to look at is who is paying them, do they do this
kind of thing on company time, was it part of the reason they got
hired? If the answers to all those questions are "Yes", then it
seems to me that the company is providing the resources through the
people it has chosen to hire and the work it expects them to do.
>For example, not implementing poorly-thought-out mail filtering
>or screwing up HTTP 1.1 support would be a good start [see attached ASCII
>document] and respecting work done by non-AOLers (meaning leaving
>copyrighted work intact including all attributions, so that it's easily
>distinguishable from AOL's own work) would be nice.
The mail filtering I can address -- this issue is being forwarded
to our developers. The HTTP support I can't, especially since we're
integrating commercial software to provide the web browser function.
That would have to be directed at the people who implement the web
browser we are integrating.
As for respecting copyrighted work, I'm not aware of the specific
instances which you mention. As a FAQ maintainer myself, I can
guarantee you that I would be quite upset if someone did something
like that to me, and I can also assure you that if anyone at AOL is
doing something like this, I am not the only person who would be very
upset, and we would all work to get this offender recalibrated. Give
me details, and I'll knock down doors (no matter who they belong to).
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 17:10:44 1997
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References: ; from "Chuq Von
Rospach" on Feb 2, 1997 14:20:53 -0800
<01IEXZM61XYW9AN0LG@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 16:57:37 -0800
To: jeffw@smoe.org (Jeff Wasilko), chuqui@plaidworks.com (Chuq Von Rospach)
From: Chuq Von Rospach
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror
from AOL)
Cc: EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU (E. Allen Smith), brad@his.com,
list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
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At 3:57 PM -0800 2/2/97, Jeff Wasilko wrote:
>I've found that it has the nice side effect of weeding out people
>who can't follow instructions. Of the 106 people with pending
>subscriptions, 25% are from AOL. And the majority of those are
>older than 24 hours (pending confirmations are valid for 2
>weeks).
Either that, or are being spammed onto your lists, and this at least
saves you the trouble of dealing with them. I've been watching the
spammers using my site pretty closely, and it's clear that somewhere
out there is some set of instructions, because these guys are using
some obsolete information about my site that makes it easy to track
them and undo their damage. I'm looking forward to when I can just shut
down the loophole completely.
chuq
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com)
( +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 17:15:16 1997
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Sun, 02 Feb 1997 16:52:03 PST
From: "Brian Axe"
To: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM
Subject: Entrepreneur looking for mailing list / website developer in the SF Bay area
Content-Type: text/plain
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I have been reading the digest for a while now and am impressed by the amount of
expertise of the individuals partaking in the List-Managers-Digest. I am
starting a business on the Web that has a high dependency on mailing lists and
am looking for a developer/programmer to work closely with me on a part time
basis.
For over a year, I have been working as product manager for a venture backed,
consumer website that was just voted as one of the top web sites for 1996 (only
7 were chosen) by Business Week. I have obtained a wealth of knowledge about
the key success factors (marketing, interface design, operations) of a website.
This coupled with my hands-on skills (Unix, HTML, light cgi programming…) allow
me to produce a design specification/prototype that only requires "back-end"
development. Lastly, I was a teaching assistant for the technology
entrepreneurship class while at graduate school at Stanford and have developed
an invaluable network of friends and colleagues.
The first phase of my roll-out plan requires around 40 hrs of
development/programming. I am looking for a long term partner that will help
develop the mailing list engine and cgi generated pages as well as perform
ongoing technical support. Since I am looking for a partner, not a contractor,
I am offering equity in the company as compensation. At the end of 2 years, I
estimate that the 2 years of vested equity could very easily be worth $500K-1M.
This is an opportunistic time to join with me.
Ideal candidates will have: a BSCS, created applications using Sendmail, C/C++
and Perl in a UNIX environment, and web development & web server experience.
If interested, please contact me at your earliest convenience via email. It is
a firm requirement that you be located in the SF Bay Area.
Brian Axe
brianaxe@hotmail.com
---------------------------------------------------------
Get Your *Web-Based* Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
---------------------------------------------------------
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 17:40:40 1997
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Subject: Re: Stale horror from AOL
To: brad@his.com (Brad Knowles)
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 20:17:50 -0500 (EST)
From: "Merrill Cook"
Cc: kgdykes@thinkage.on.ca, list-managers@greatcircle.com
In-Reply-To: from "Brad Knowles" at Feb 2, 97 02:07:53 am
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>From Brad Knowles:
>
> Yup, it would. And it will. We've been working on this
> replacement system for several months now, and it's finally getting
> to the point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Can we help with testing and certification?
Might be in our own best interests if we had a chance to give
feedback or whatever before eight million of our subscribers start
using it...
--
Regards,
Merrill Cook
Louisville KY
mcook@pcusa.org or MERRILL COOK on Ecunet/PresbyNet
http://www.pcusa.org/pcusa.html
-+-
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 17:44:07 1997
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References: Message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:54:44 -0500 from Brad
Knowles
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:11:22 -0800
To: Eric Thomas ,
List Managers
From: Chuq Von Rospach
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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At 4:02 PM -0800 2/2/97, Eric Thomas wrote:
>Yeah but digests are so much trouble that I wouldn't even dream of this.
Not on my site, and not with my users. Personally, I don't use them,
but I know for a fact my user base loves them, once they're clued into
their existance. And I have little to no trouble with sites accepting
them. Of course, I'm careful to keep my digests under 30K, except in
very rare cases.
Are you sure you aren't letting your personal attitude towards digests
color how you think your users view them?
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com)
( +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 17:47:34 1997
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To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
Path: lokkur.dexter.mi.us!not-for-mail
From: scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us (Steve Simmons)
Newsgroups: local.list-managers
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
Date: 2 Feb 1997 20:06:21 -0500
Organization: Inland Sea
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Brad Knowles writes:
>At 6:26 AM -0500 1/30/1997, Dr. Manion wrote:
>>ROFL!
>>Again, I see that AOL doesn't want to take responsibility. "Well, if
>>you were as big as us -- you couldn't do anything either!" ROFL!
> If you want to be a part of this solution, please do so.
>Otherwise, you're part of the problem, and you should get out of the
>way.
Seconded. AOL certianly has its problems, but you know, it's gotten
a helluva lot more responsive in the last few years. No small part of
that is due to the work of folks like Brad Knowles.
By contrast, you've offered repeated derision and bragging about your
two years on the internet. Well golly, I am impressed. Come back in
eight years, and you'll still be ten years behind Brad, Chuq, or me.
If you have something useful to offer, do so. If not, kindly shut up
while the rest of us figure out if we can do anything to help Brad.
--
``Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.''
-- Gore Vidal, on Truman Capote
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 17:52:24 1997
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Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror from
To: brad@his.com (Brad Knowles)
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 20:33:59 -0500 (EST)
From: "Merrill Cook"
Cc: list-managers@greatcircle.com
In-Reply-To: from "Brad Knowles" at Feb 2, 97 03:00:01 am
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>From Brad Knowles:
>
> But, taking my AOL hat off now, how would you educate a large
> user community like this? I mean, the average Usenet poster seems
> quite clueless enough (give most of the posts I've read and personal
Just brainstorming here... but how about making them take an
interactive test, like a driver's certification test? Set it up
so they can't send note 1 on the internet unless they can answer
ten questions correctly about addressing, etiquette, Good Times,
pyramid schemes, chain letters, unsolicited advertising, and
unsubscribing from lists. Set it up so they can't send note 1 to
usenet without answering a similar set of ten questions about it.
Make it hyper-linked to the appropriate FAQ so they can look up
the answer if they don't know it, an open-book test; automate it
so if they miss one, it asks something similar a few questions
later, and won't let them through until they can answer ALL ten
questions (or get whatever the minimum score is out of however
many questions they finally get asked).
Or how about an interactive routine with audio that says "raise
your right hand and repeat after me: I promise not to pass on
notes about the Good time virus or other unsubstantiated rumors; I
promise not to participate in chain letters; I promise not to send
unsolicited commercial mail; ..."
Make it into a game.
With all of AOL's resources, you ought to be able to come up with
something...
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 17:55:52 1997
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From: Kynn Bartlett
Message-Id: <199702030141.RAA10809@ayla.idyllmtn.com>
Subject: Re: Stale horror from AOL
To: mcook@pcusa01.ecunet.org (Merrill Cook)
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:41:30 -0800 (PST)
Cc: brad@his.com, kgdykes@thinkage.on.ca, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM
In-Reply-To: <9702022017.aa01013@pcusa01.ecunet.org> from "Merrill Cook" at Feb 2, 97 08:17:50 pm
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Merrill Cook wrote:
> >From Brad Knowles:
> > Yup, it would. And it will. We've been working on this
> > replacement system for several months now, and it's finally getting
> > to the point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
> Can we help with testing and certification?
> Might be in our own best interests if we had a chance to give
> feedback or whatever before eight million of our subscribers start
> using it...
There's probably information on how to apply for jobs at AOL at the
following website:
http://www.aol.com/
--Kynn
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 17:59:29 1997
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References: from "Brad
Knowles" at Feb 2, 97 02:07:53 am
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 20:41:33 -0500
To: "Merrill Cook"
From: Brad Knowles
Subject: Re: Stale horror from AOL
Cc: kgdykes@thinkage.on.ca, list-managers@greatcircle.com, knowlesb@aol.net
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At 8:17 PM -0500 2/2/1997, Merrill Cook wrote:
>>From Brad Knowles:
>>
>> Yup, it would. And it will. We've been working on this
>> replacement system for several months now, and it's finally getting
>> to the point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
>
>Can we help with testing and certification?
>
>Might be in our own best interests if we had a chance to give
>feedback or whatever before eight million of our subscribers start
>using it...
Good idea. We've already got it up and running in an unpublished
test mode, with the idea that we'd do whatever testing we could think
of. We'll certainly add testing with various mailing list management
packages as well.
If anyone is interested in testing this stuff with us, please
drop me a note at my work email address (knowlesb@aol.net).
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 18:02:51 1997
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Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 02:07:07 +0100
From: Eric Thomas
Subject: Re: fresh horror from AOL
To: List Managers
In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:11:22 -0800 from Chuq Von Rospach
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
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On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:11:22 -0800 Chuq Von Rospach
said:
>Are you sure you aren't letting your personal attitude towards digests
>color how you think your users view them?
But I have not commented on whether or not my users like digests! Since I
always offer digests, and since I was speaking about lists I run in my
spare time, I just don't think it's relevant; they can have it their way
whether I use them myself or not on this or that particular list, and if
they don't like the defaults I chose they can go start their own list.
What I said is that users who are getting digests give me more trouble as
a whole, even though they're a minority, because answering questions from
human beings about why they didn't get this or that digest takes me a lot
more time than auto-processing bounces. Digests are also dangerous with
newbies. It doesn't matter how many times you tell them not to quote the
whole digest when replying, they'll do it anyway. You'll add code to
detect this and reject the posting, but it doesn't matter because they'll
find a new MUA that mangles the quoted message in such a way (for
instance a uuencoded "attachment" or maybe rewriting the header in X.400
or proprietary format) that they'll manage to quote it anyway. And even
if you succeed (or add a posting size limit so they *really* can't quote
the whole thing back), they'll write to ask how come they can't post to
the list, and you'll have to explain that the reply function isn't the
only way to post to a list, after which they'll ask you which menu you
are talking about and helpfully indicate that they are using a Gateway in
case it makes any difference. In a professional environment this may all
be fine and well, but when I run a list in my spare time I don't want to
do user support. I do enough of this at work, thank you very much :-) So
they get the regular subscription option that doesn't confuse them and I
have my bounces auto-processed and keep being a happy camper. I'm not
saying this is Better, I'm saying it saves me time. Maybe if I were
running my lists on 1991 hardware or if I had to read every single bounce
myself at 2400bps I would set things up differently, but that's another
story. Obviously this also depends on who your audience is and what mail
software they use.
Eric
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 18:25:53 1997
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Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:05:43 -0800
To: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM
From: garyb@outlawnet.com (Gary Bickford)
Subject: Is Bob Metcalfe right or wrong?
Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM
Precedence: bulk
This list seems to allow a fair amount of editorial content on the part of
the members, so I'd like to raise two related issues. Since many of the
members of this list may be directly affected, hopefully you won't all
flame me for wasting bandwidth. :^} If you don't think this is
list-related but do have an opinion, feel free to reply directly to me and
I'll summarize later.
1. [Email Charging] Bob Metcalfe, (inventor of Ethernet and
co-founder of 3COM, thinks the internet is due for serious brownouts -
thousands of people unable to get access for hours at a time) One of his
recommendations, which would also "fix" the economics of email, is to
charge on a per-piece and/or routed mileage basis for all email. Actually,
he recommends it for all traffic, but let's stick to email here.
2. [Local Access] The FCC is considering allowing local phone
companies to charge ISPs as much as 1.5 to 2 cents per minute (90 cents to
$1.20 per hour) for line access, which would no doubt be passed on to the
user. [I note that Bill Gates seems to be in favor of this.]
According to Webweek magazine (www.webweek.com), the FCC has installed an
email address for _informal_ comments on this issue at isp@fcc.gov.
Deadline for _formal_ comments is 2/21. All formal comments will be posted
at www.fcc.gov/isp.html
For my part, I think that local telephone competition and fast-connect
technologies such as ISDN should make question #2 obsolete, unless they
manage to get it through FCC before the technology and market deal with it.
end
=======
Gary Bickford, FXT Corporation http://www.fxt.com
System integration, active web site design, intranets.
garyb@fxt.com 541-923-3060
From list-managers-owner Sun Feb 2 18:41:12 1997
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Message-ID: <19970202212739.LS51352@smoe.org>
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 21:27:40 -0500
From: jeffw@smoe.org (Jeff Wasilko)
To: chuqui@plaidworks.com (Chuq Von Rospach)
Subject: Re: Educating large masses of users (was: Re: fresh horror from AOL)
References: ; <01IEXZM61XYW9AN0LG@mbcl.rutgers.edu>